(Ashgate New Critical Thinking in Philosophy) Richard Dien Winfield - From Concept To Objectivity - Thinking Through Hegel's Subjective Logic-Routledge (2006)

FROM CONCEPT TO OBJECTIVITY
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From Concept to Objectivity
Thinking Through Hegel’s Subjective Logic
RICHARD DIEN WINFIELD

University o f Georgia, USA
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Winfield, Richard Dien, 1950-
From concept to objectivity : thinking through Hegel’s subjective logic. —
(Ashgate new critical thinking in philosophy)
1.Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770-1831 2.Logic
I.Title
160.9*2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Winfield, Richard Dien, 1950-
From concept to objectivity : thinking through Hegel’s subjective logic / Richard
Dien Winfield,
p. cm.
Includes index.
1. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770^1831.2. Logic, Modem—19th century.

I. Title.
B2949.L8W56 2006
160.92—dc22
2005032001
ISBN 13: 978-0-7546-5536-7 (hbk)
ISBN 13: 978-1-4724-8414-7 (pbk)
Contents
Introduction viii-x
1 Formal, Transcendental, and Systematic Logic 1

The Problem of Prescriptive Logic 1
Formal Logic and the Self-Justification of Reason 2
The Impasse of Transcendental Logic 6
Systematic Logic and Self-Determination 10
Systematic Logic and the Question of Determinacy 14
2 Method in Systematic Logic 19

Method As Determined From the Requirements of Logic 20
The Reflexivity of Prescriptive Logic 25
The Method of Philosophy as the Method of Logic 27
3 Determinacy Without Appeal to the Given 31

The Self-Evidence of the Category of Something 31
The Lure of the Irreducibility of Determinacy 33
Dilemmas of the Theory of Substance 33
The Justifications o f Substance 34
The Fatal Enigma o f Substance 35
The Dilemma of Rooting Determinacy in a Privileged
Determiner 36
Conceiving Something Without Privileged Givens or
Conceptual Schemes 39
From Indeterminacy to Determinate Being 40
Being, Nonbeing, and Being Determinate 43
Quality, Otherness, and Relation 44
Something and Other 46
The Logic of Determinacy and the Logic of the Concept 49
4 Concept, Individuality, and Self-Determination 51

The Concept in Philosophy 51
vi From Concept to Objectivity
The Concept in Systematic Logic 53

Freedom, Individuality, and the Requirements of
Conceptual Truth 57
The Logic of Self-Determination as the Logic of the Concept 58
The Concept, Objectivity, and the Logic of Truth 59
5 From Concept to Judgment 67

The Challenge of A Non-Formal Determination of Concept,
Judgment, and Syllogism 69
Principal Guiding Theses in Hegel’s Subjective Logic 70
Universality, Particularity, and Individuality in Anticipated
Connection 74
The Concept of the Concept 78
From Concept to Judgment 84
6 The Forms of Judgment and the Types of Universals 89

Preliminary Overview of the Forms of Judgment and the
Types of Universality 91
Qualitative Judgment and Abstract Universality 94
Quantitative Judgment and Class Membership 96
Judgments of Necessity and Genus and Species 98
Categorical Judgment 99
Hypothetical Judgment 100
Disjunctive Judgment 101
Judgments of the Concept and the Universal of Normativity 102
Assertoric Judgment 103
Problematic Judgment 103
Apodeictic Judgment 103
Beyond Judgment 104
7 The System of Syllogism 107

Reason and Syllogism 107
From Judgment to Syllogism 110
Differentiation of the Forms of Syllogism 111
The Minimal Form of Syllogism: the Syllogism of
Determinate Being 113
The Syllogism of Reflection 118
The Syllogism of Necessity 122
Why There is No Syllogism of the Concept 127
From Syllogism to Objectivity 128
Contents vii
8 Objectivity in Logic and Nature 131
The Perplexity of Subjectivity and Objectivity as Logical
Categories 131
Subjectivity and Objectivity as Logical Categories 132
What is Logical and What is Subjective in Logical
Subjectivity 133
What is Logical and What is Objective in Logical
Objectivity 138
The Distinction Between Objectivity in Logic and
Objectivity in Nature 140
Works Cited 145

Index 147
Introduction
Reason has come to be regarded as either opposed to objectivity or all too

immersed within it. As opposed, reason confronts an independently given
otherness never conceivable as it is in itself. As immersed within objectivity,
reason stands conditioned by particular practices that render thought powerless
to grasp reality in its own right. On either account, truth remains beyond
reason, which at most can judge the consistency of claims whose veracity it can
never establish. Nonetheless, both views offer their thoughts about reason
without questioning how an impotent reason can know itself with any
authority.
No philosopher can escape dogmatism without considering why thought
should enjoy the privilege that philosophy confers upon it by relying on reason.
Yet thinking about thinking seems caught in a hopeless circularity. How can
valid thinking be established without employing valid thought from the outset?
But then, how can valid thinking be any more than an assumption,
insusceptible of any validation?
These questions are crucial for logic, whose task is thinking about thinking.
Few logical investigations, however, have seriously addressed these problems,
let alone even tried to account systematically for the concept, judgment and
syllogism, which have played so central a role in logic since Aristotle.
The signal exception to this negligence is Hegel, whose Science o f Logic
remains the most radical and thorough attempt to resolve the dilemmas of
thinking about thinking, establish how thought can grasp objectivity, and
secure the truth of philosophy’s reliance upon reason. Ever since the Science o f
Logic's publication, critics have focused their attention upon its beginning and
the difficulty of developing thought without taking valid thinking for granted.
This is a key question and it must be addressed. Yet, of no less importance is
Hegel’s groundbreaking attempt in the final part of the Science, the so-called
Subjective Logic, to account for the concept, judgment, and syllogism, and
their relation to the categorization of objectivity. Here, the key elements of
traditional logic become thematic, together with how the universal and self-
determination are conceivable. Although these topics are pivotal for
understanding reason and its role in philosophy, Hegel’s treatment has received
comparatively little attention, either among Hegel scholars or contemporary
philosophers in general.
From Concept to Objectivity seeks to remedy that inattention by thinking
Introduction IX
through the core categorial development of Hegel’s Subjective Logic so as to

uncover the special nature and authority of conceptual determination. This
requires first clarifying the preliminary logical problems that prepare the way
for conceiving the concept. To this end, Chapter 1 examines how systematic
logic can overcome the vicious circularity of thinking valid thinking, enabling
philosophy to proceed without foundations. Chapter 2 next addresses the
perplexities of method as they apply to a science of logic that cannot
presuppose any method without question-begging. Following arguments drawn
from Hegel’s Logic of Being, Chapter 3 shows how systematic logic can
account for something determinate without taking determinacy for granted.
This sets the stage for considering how the determinacy of the concept can be
systematically conceived. Chapter 4 addresses this challenge in view of the
problems of conceiving universality and its connection with self-determination
and the autonomy of reason. Having shown how the concept is determinable in
terms of universality, particularity, and individuality, Chapter 5 examines how
these categories give rise to judgment. With the transition from concept to
judgment accounted for, Chapter 6 systematically conceives the different forms
of judgment in respect of the different types of universality that figure within
them. The conclusion of Chapter 6 shows how the forms of judgment achieve
closure by engendering syllogism. Chapter 7 thereupon thinks through the
successive forms of syllogism that result, showing how they reach exhaustive
determination by paving the way for the categorization of objectivity. The
perplexities of that categorization are the theme of the final Chapter 8, which
shows how subjectivity and objectivity can be logically determined without
casting thought in irrevocable opposition to reality.
A Note on the Text
The above chapters each incorporate previously published material, both

modified and supplemented, with the permissions of the publishers listed
below.
Chapter 1 incorporates in altered form material originally published as,
“Dialectical Logic and The Conception of Truth”, Journal o f the British
Society fo r Phenomenology, Vol. 18, No. 2, 1987, pp. 133-148.
“The Method of Hegel’s Science of Logic”, in Essays On Hegel’s Logic, ed. by
George di Giovanni (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), pp.
45-57, and then republished with minor alterations in Richard Dien Winfield,
Freedom and Modernity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991)
pp. 3-13.
X From Concept to Objectivity

“Conceiving Something without Any Conceptual Scheme”, The Owl o f
Minerva, Vol. 18, No. 1, Fall 1986, pp. 13-28, and then republished in
Richard Dien Winfield, Overcoming Foundations: Studies in Systematic
Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), pp. 55-75.
Chapter 4 incoiporates in altered form material originally published as,
“Concept, Individuality and Truth”, Bulletin o f the Hegel Society o f Great
Britain, Double Issue, Nos. 39/45, 1999, 35-46, and then republished in
Richard Dien Winfield, Autonomy and Normativity: Investigations o f Truth,
Right and Beauty (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2001), pp. 42-53.
“From Concept to Judgment: Rethinking Hegel’s Overcoming of Formal
Logic”, Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review, XL, 2001, 53-74.
Chapter 6 incorporates in altered form material published as, “The Types of
Universals and the Forms of Judgment”, Cardozo Journal o f Law, Policy and
Ethics, Vol.3:l (2004), pp. 125-142, and then republished in H egel’s Theory
o f the Subject, ed. by David Gray Carlson (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2006), pp. 99-113.
Chapter 7 incorporates in altered form material published as, “The System
of Syllogism”, Cardozo Journal o f Law, Policy and Ethics, Vol. 3:1 (2004),
pp. 245-268, and then republished in Hegel’s Theory o f the Subject, ed. by
David Gray Carlson (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 125—
145.
Chapter 8 incorporates in altered form material published as, “Objectivity in
Logic and Nature”, The Owl o f Minerva, 34:1 (Fall/Winter 2002-03), pp. 77-
90.
Chapter 1
Formal, Transcendental, and

Systematic Logic
If philosophy is to legitimate its own quest to conceive truth, it must somehow

establish the authority of reason. This requires thinking about thinking, the very
challenge giving logic its vocation.
The Problem of Prescriptive Logic
Logic, however, can be either descriptive or prescriptive. Descriptive logic

describes how given arguments and given conventions of reasoning are
ordered. Since descriptive logic is limited to analyzing the factual operations of
reasoning, it is a positive science, addressing a given subject matter with a
given standpoint whose relation to its topic is equally taken for granted. Due to
these qualifications, what results from descriptive logic can offer nothing
binding for determining how reason should operate to think the truth. All
descriptive logic can provide are estimations of how arguments have been
made - estimations relative to the representative character of the data selected
for analysis, as well as to the honesty, interpretive astuteness and observational
accuracy of the descriptive logician. Not only do these judgments of fact leave
undecided how thought should function, but they offer no definitive account of
the reality of argument, given the relative character of factual knowledge.
By contrast, prescriptive logic does not describe how reasoning operates,
but prescribes how it should proceed to think the truth. Although one may
question whether prescriptive logic has been properly developed, it is
incoherent to argue that there can be no prescriptive, but only descriptive logic.
If one takes such a position, advocated by Quine1and many others, one denies
thinking any objectively valid standards and instead allows reason only opined
standards, based on subjective assumptions, linguistic usage, cultural tradition,
pragmatic agreement, or some other unjustified factor. With thought so limited,1
1 See “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, in Willard Van Orman Quine, From A

Logical Point of View (New York: Harper and Row, 1963).
2 From Concept to Objectivity
there is no more to do than describe its operations and deconstruct its operative
canons in terms of the factors conditioning them. Although this relativizing of
reason finds wide acclaim, it is as totally absurd as any form of “radical”
skepticism. Those who grant hegemony to descriptive logic to the exclusion of
prescriptive logic patently contradict themselves by precluding objectively true
reasoning while making putatively objective arguments about the structure of
rationality. If they were to be consistent, these thinkers would have to admit
that their depiction of reasoning is itself a mere opinion with no more authority
than opposing views.
Nevertheless, even if the possibility of prescriptive logic cannot be
coherently denied, any attempt to develop prescriptive logic seems caught in a
hopeless dilemma. If prescriptive logic provides the canon of thought enabling
argument to supply rational justification, then how can prescriptive logic be
properly determined without presupposing the standard of rationality it should
supply? Can prescriptive logic be a canon of thought if its very principles
cannot be rationally justified without already being taken for granted?
This vicious circularity invites skepticism, even if skepticism is paradoxical
on its own terms. If no prescriptive logic can be defended without
presupposing itself, rational argument seems to be impossible. Insofar as all
argument must conform to the canons of prescriptive logic to be certified as
rational, there is no way to decide between competing candidates for
prescriptive logic since each will satisfy the standards of prescriptive logic by
conforming to itself.
Somehow this problem must be surmounted if prescriptive logic is to be
possible and philosophical reason is to achieve self-justification. Historically,
philosophers have offered three fundamentally different candidates for
prescriptive logic that seem to exhaust the possible structures of reason. These
alternatives are formal, transcendental and systematic logic.
Formal Logic and the Self-Justification of Reason
Not illogically, the candidate first developed for prescriptive logic is formal
logic. Both its motivation and character are defined by the appeal to given
determination underlying formal logic’s approach to rational argument. As a
normative canon of thought, formal logic rests upon the understanding, so
forcefully propounded by Aristotle,2 that reasons can justify opinions only if
there is some antecedently apprehended given principle upon which
2 See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI, Ch. 6, and Posterior Analytics,
Book I, Ch. 2.
Formal, Transcendental, and Systematic Logic 3
justification can rest. If justification instead operates without a given principle

to serve as an accepted ultimate reason for all other reasons, no justified reason
can ever be supplied. The reasons sought to provide justification would always
be wanting justification for themselves due to the infinite regress of
legitimating reasons requiring others to back them up. To overcome this
problem, rational argument would seem to require starting from some given
whose authority need not be based on any other, while following some given
method whose procedure is similarly unmediated. Only then will the move
from the given supporting all further reasons have a form that can be legitimate
instead of being undermined by the same infinite regress whose avoidance
seems to necessitate some given content at the base of all argument.
This suggests that the reason supplying reasons transforming opinion into
truth has a structure characterized by a formal logic where both the primitive
terms of reasoning and the form of reasoning are given. Insofar as reasoning
will then invariably have certain given premises and functions underlying all its
applications, it follows that thinking can be characterized in abstraction from
what is thought.
All the other basic features of formal logic as a canon of reason directly
derive from the recourse to givens it employs to rescue justification. Since
reason is here ascribed primitive terms or premises from which it proceeds, as
well as given operations that govern its reasoning, the formal logic of thought
is a deductive logic whose results are purely analytic. Insofar as thought has a
formal structure, whose primitive terms and functions are not determined by
thinking but given prior to its exercise as the ubiquitous scaffold for thinking
any thoughts whatever, all further content must derive from an external source,
be it intuition, imagination, the given wealth of language, or something else. As
a consequence, thought does not generate new content but only arrives at what
conforms to its primitive terms and invariable functions. The deductive
reasoning of formal logic thus results in purely analytic conclusions contained
in the premises and externally supplied propositions, as modified by the given
operations of thought. The ensuing reasoning is entirely tautological and, as
such, is governed by the principle of contradiction, which, keeps terms self-
identical by insuring that, without further qualification, nothing can be what it
is not. Demonstrative justification then becomes possible so long as the
concluded implication does not contradict any of the premises and given
content from which it is derived.
This entails a conception of truth that is entirely formal. If reasoning must
operate with given terms and functions and draw analytic conclusions in
conformity with the principle of contradiction, the truth it justifies possesses no
other distinction from unjustified opinion than that the thinking of it is
internally consistent. Such reason contributes knowledge of one thing and one
thing alone: the correspondence of thought with itself. As a whole, logic here
comprises nothing but reason’s self-understanding of how it can conform to
itself. If formal logic be taken as the exclusive arbiter of rationality, reasoning
provides only the formal criterion of truth entailed in the coherence or self-
consistency of argument.
As common as this characterization of reason may be, its adoption is
plagued by conceptual difficulties. The more trivial of these are the dilemmas
that arise when formal logic is given ontological status by being treated not just
as a canon but as an organon of reason, prescribing not simply how reason can
conform to itself but how it can correspond to, and so truly conceive, reality.
This position is pursued by dialectical materialism as it is classically
formulated by Engels, canonized by Lenin, and ritualized by his successors.
Although dialectical materialism pretends to offer a dialectical logic, it
characterizes reason in terms of a formal logic of contradiction consisting in an
assortment of logical operators and functions that are just as given prior to
every exercise of reasoning as the analogous terms in the deductive logic of
Aristotle.3 In offering these givens, dialectical materialism does not just
stipulate the laws of reason without subjecting them to critique. It further
presupposes the correspondence of thought and reality, treating its formal logic
of contradiction as a metaphysical principle ordering reality as well as thought.
Indeed, even if such a logic of contradiction were common to reality and
thought, that logic could not specify the relation of identity and difference that
correspondence involves. Whatever formal principle may be shared by reality
and thought cannot itself define the distinction between them without which
there can be no contrasting terms to correspond. Hence dialectical materialism
would have to provide some other principle or principles of unity to guarantee
the ontological role of dialectics - something it cannot do without canceling the
postulated primacy of its formal logic of contradiction.
This problem, however, is secondary to the basic dilemma dialectical
materialism faces in justifying the logic it stipulates for reason or the
application of that logic to being and the correspondence of thought and reality
it is intended to secure. Because dialectical materialism conceives thought to
have a given structure defined by various operators and laws, there is no way it
can escape the vicious circularity of having to employ those rules in any
attempt to justify them.
3 In this vein, Engels lists three laws of dialectics as the most general laws of
nature, history and thought: the law of the transformation of quantity into quality and
vice versa, the law of the interpenetration of opposites, and the law of the negation of
the negation. See Frederick Engels, Dialectics o f Nature, J. B. S. Haldane, trans. (New
York: International Publishers, 1960), p. 26.
It is this problem that undermines the whole enterprise of advancing formal

logic as a canon, let alone an organon, of reason. Logical positivism exhibits
this particularly clearly, for unlike dialectical materialism, logical positivism
resolutely accepts the formal consequences of characterizing reason in terms of
given structures and avoids the fallacies entailed in applying formal logic to
reality. Identifying reason and rational argument with deductive reasoning,
logical positivism consistently concludes that all a priori knowledge is analytic,
consisting in tautologies governed by the principle of contradiction. By
contrast, all synthetic knowledge is judged to be empirical and subject to all the
uncertainties endemic to empirical knowing. Logical positivism recognizes that
the presumed analyticity of a priori knowledge, codified in formal logic, has by
itself no relation to objective truth and rejects as analytically indemonstrable
and empirically unverifiable any assumption of the correspondence of thought
and reality. Further, in the strict form advanced by Ayer,4 logical positivism
refrains from claiming that the relations of analyticity expressed in formal logic
comprise the essential form of meaningful speech or the universally valid form
of reason’s correspondence with itself. If logical positivism were to make these
claims, it would fall victim to the dilemma of having to justify its candidate for
the canon of reason while being unable to do so without taking it for granted.
To avoid this problem, logical positivists like Ayer take the analyticity of
reason to be a matter of convention, reflecting the meanings of terms as they
are pragmatically fixed in linguistic usage. What is “contained within” or
“analytically derivable from” any given term is simply mandated by
contingently prevailing communicative behavior. This sets the stage for
challenging the whole analytic-synthetic distinction, as Quine and his follows
have done,5 for it reduces analyticity to something that can only be determined
descriptively, rather than prescriptively, by observing the conventions of
discourse. Logical positivism accordingly adopts the skeptical view that
philosophy must be analytic in the sense of limiting itself to pointing out the
consistency or inconsistency of the linguistic usage of terms employed in
articulating the synthetic knowledge obtained from experience.
Although logical positivism might thereby appear to abandon prescriptive\
logic, this is not the case. Logical positivism offers its reduction of reason to
deductive inference not as a matter of convention and empirical happenstance,
but as the irreducible fate of thought, excluding all theories to the contrary. By
giving its blanket characterization of reasoning this juridical role, logical
positivism puts itself in the self-annulling position of affirming a doctrine of
4 See A. J. Ayer’s Logic, Truth, and Language (Middlesex, England: Penguin

Books, 1982).
5 Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”.
reason whose own validity can neither be empirically verified nor analytically
established.
This plight of logical positivism underlines the ultimate absurdity of
claiming that all a priori knowledge is analytic and that deductive reasoning
can be the principle of rationality. It is absurd to claim that all a priori
knowledge is analytic because that very claim is synthetic, depending upon an
antecedent acceptance of entailment that first makes it possible to count on any
analysis whatsoever. Similarly, deductive reasoning cannot be the model of
philosophical argument, for, as Plato and Aristotle point out,6all deduction
ultimately rests upon nondeducible premises and canons of deduction that
would have to be justified by some other form of cognition. In each respect, the
conclusion is the same. Formal logic cannot provide reason with a canon, for
reliance upon any givens leaves reason ruled by dogmatically accepted
principles for which no justification can be coherently offered. Not even the
introduction of an intuitive intelligence to apprehend immediately the
indemonstrable premises and procedures of formal logic can salvage the latter’s
prescriptive role. Plato’s and Aristotle’s recourse to intuition of first principles
in order to ground deductive reasoning may testify to awareness of a serious
problem. Yet it only resurrects the same dilemma of rooting justification in
something given that is, as such, beyond justification. Just as formal logic
cannot account for the legitimacy of its own rules of thought, so intelligence
cannot justify its intuitions without introducing reasons that undermine the
foundational primacy of what it intuits as first principle.
The Impasse of Transcendental Logic
Transcendental logic is explicitly designed to resolve the difficulties that come

to the fore when formal logic is offered as a prescriptive doctrine of reason.
Recognizing the incoherence of restricting a priori knowledge to analytic
conclusions and the uncritical dogmatism of conceiving reason to be ordered
by given terms and functions, the proponents of transcendental philosophy tie
the self-legitimation of philosophical thought to the acquisition of synthetic a
priori knowledge. Unlike ancient metaphysical thinkers who claim synthetic a
priori knowledge of the first principles of being, transcendental philosophers
reconceive synthetic a priori knowledge to lie in a logic specifying how
cognition itself determines necessary features of the objects of knowledge,
allowing knowing to secure objectivity without dogmatic appeal to the given.
6 See Plato, The Republic, Book VII, 533c-d, and Aristotle, Nieomachean Ethics
and Posterior Analytics.
This transcendental logic was pioneered by Kant in a manner whereby

objective knowledge was limited to objects of experience, leaving the very
structure of experience beyond objective knowing. As a result, the rules of the
understanding were uncritically drawn from traditional formal logic, while
knowledge of the structure of experience was left to a standpoint whose
authority was never critically established. Subsequent transcendental logicians,
such as Fichte and Husserl, were well aware that if transcendental logic was
developed only with regard to objects of experience, then both the rules of the
understanding and the reasoning of the transcendental philosopher would be
accepted without having their own objectivity established. To remedy this
failing, the scope of transcendental logic would have to be radically extended
to include determining the conditions of the possibility for knowing not only
objects of experience but objects of thought in general, including
transcendental logic itself.
The project of transcendental logic is accordingly best understood by
leaving aside the peculiarities of Kantian philosophy and considering instead
the general project of the transcendental turn in relation to the basic problems
of prescriptive logic.
Confronting the failure of previous attempts to base truth in some privileged
given, transcendental logic seeks to salvage justification by conceiving rational
validity to lie in what is determined by some privileged epistemic determiner.
This determiner is the transcendental condition of knowing that plays the same
role whether it be characterized as noumenal subjectivity, intentionality,
Dasein, communicative competence, language games, or the hermeneutic
situation. Whatever its guise, the transcendental condition provides for
objective knowledge, meaningful speech, or, if one will, just the ongoing
conversation of mankind by comprising a cognitive structure determining the
object of knowing in its relation to knowing so as to permit knowledge to
conform to its object, whether that object be a tangible thing or a conceptual or
linguistic content. Instead of taking truth as a given determinacy, discovered in
the immediate intuition of passive contemplation, objective knowledge here
involves a determined determinacy, constructed, rather than found, by a
structure of knowing figuring as a privileged determiner of objective validity.
Transcendental logic turns to develop objective validity in these terms of
determined determinacy in response to the basic objectivity problem of
knowledge. So long as what is knowable is available to knowing only as
knowledge and the object of knowing has a given determinacy to which
knowledge must conform to be true, there seems to be no way to certify any
correspondence of knowledge and its object. Since knowing must always refer
to what it knows to evaluate its knowledge claims, knowing is always left
comparing one belief with another, without ever accessing the object in itself.
If, however, the structure of knowing, or reference, if one adopts a linguistic

perspective, determines the object so that its very givenness is a content
constituted by that structure, then the correspondence between that object and
the reference to it can be secured. The object will then conform to the structure
of knowing to which it owes its necessary character, and knowing will be in a
position to know what it has put into the object. Synthetic a priori knowledge
would then be possible, for the determined determinacy of the object of
knowing would be a new content, rather than an analytic given, and yet be
determined by a structure underlying and therefore prior to all particular acts of
reference in “experience”.
On this basis, objectivity would consist in contents, be they concepts,
meanings, or things, that are conditioned rather than unconditioned and self-
determined. Indeed, because the object of knowledge is knowable only insofar
as it is constructed by the structure of knowing, nothing unconditioned and free
can be known. If, following Kant, one acknowledges that a universal that
determines its own particulars and an individual that is a law unto itself are
both unconditioned, then one would have to grant that the particulars of
objectivity would be subject to given laws, just as valid universals would apply
to independently given particulars. Significantly, this would hold just as much
for corporeal things as for thinking, for if reason is to be an object of
knowledge, it must fulfill the same conditions.
When transcendental logic proceeds to specify the conditions of knowing in
their determining role, it must avoid both referring to any givenness, be it of
the object of knowing or of knowing itself, and falling into solipsism whereby
the object of knowledge and all standards of truth are mere postulates. These
troubles arise the moment transcendental logic launches its explication of the
conditions of objective knowing as something that must be performed before
any actual knowledge claims can be justified. In the absence of such
preliminary inquiry, all putative knowledge would seem to assume that
certainty guarantees truth, that knowing conforms to real and conceptual
objectivity. Transcendental logic, however, itself presumes a certain knowledge
of its own: that knowing or reference can be examined independently of actual
knowledge and its particular objects. In this respect, transcendental logic
follows formal logic in taking reason to have a formal character underlying all
its operations.
At the same time, though, transcendental logic does aim to show how all
that is objective in thought and reality is determined without reliance upon any
dogmatically accepted givens. To take this striving seriously, transcendental
logic cannot legitimately refer to a thing-in-itself or to any other content given
independently of transcendental constitution, wherein knowable objectivity is
constructed from the structure of knowing. Conversely, to succeed in
distinguishing objective knowledge from opinion, transcendental logic must

somehow determine the object of knowledge without reducing it to an arbitrary
construct of knowing. What is an object of thought must be immanent to
knowing, yet be more than a subjective representation. This must be true
whether the object of thought is a real thing or a concept, for in either case, the
absence of distinguishable aspects of immanence and transcendence, or of
reference and referent, removes the possibility of establishing objective
validity.
Although Kant undermines his own transcendental logic by retaining
reference to a thing-in-itself and limiting transcendental constitution to objects
of experience, his transcendental deduction of the categories presents a strategy
that transcendental logic must follow to secure objectivity of knowledge.
Solipsism can be avoided and objectivity retained only if the conditions of
knowledge are one and the same as the conditions of the givenness of the
object of knowledge. Transcendental logic could then specify the principles of
objective truth since what makes knowledge or reference possible would also
supply the independent givenness of the referent of knowing and do so such
that knowledge would correspond to it. The possibility of synthetic a priori
knowledge would be secured since thought would know in a justifiable manner
objects that are neither stipulations of thought nor conclusions analytically
deduced from such assumptions. If this possibility extended beyond objects of
experience to the concepts and procedures of reason itself, then transcendental
logic could supply the self-justification of thought philosophy requires.
Try as it may, transcendental logic cannot succeed in this endeavor due to
the residual element of givenness that underlies its argument. This element is
none other than the content of the transcendental condition. Because it is the
determining condition of objective knowledge, it cannot possess the character
of being transcendentally constituted, which insures that an object of cognition
can have validity. The logical reason for this is that a determiner determines
what is other than itself and thus has a character antecedent to its act of
determination. This unconditioned givenness of its own content precisely
allows it to be the condition of what it determines. If, however, objectivity lies
in being determined by the conditions of true knowledge, then these conditions
cannot themselves enjoy objective validity. Simply by investigating the
conditions of knowing as a necessary prelude to attaining objective knowledge,
transcendental logic falls into an insoluble dilemma. Although it rightly
criticizes the dogmatic acceptance of givens in prescriptive formal logic,
transcendental logic cannot remove its own dependence upon givens without
forsaking its explication of the transcendental conditions of knowledge. As
much as transcendental logic strives to save the autonomy of reason from
dogmatism, it reduces that autonomy to a formal liberty operating within a
given framework that reason can never justify or criticize.

Transcendental logic might escape this bind i f the standpoint of the
transcendental logician could be equalized with the knowing it examines. The
knowing of transcendental logic would then be constituted with the same
objectivity that it mandates for valid knowledge. Reference to the
transcendental conditions of knowledge would no longer dogmatically assert a
given, unconstituted foundation. If this could be accomplished, allowing the
critique of knowing to become identical to the knowing under critique, the
element of givenness in the transcendental condition would be eliminated.
Instead of determining something else, the transcendental condition would now
determine itself. Rather than being something given, it would be determined in
accord with the transcendental logic whose substance it is. Transcendental
logic would turn into a self-determining logic of objectivity, whose explication
of the possibility of true knowledge would satisfy the same requirements it
establishes for valid objects of thought.
Although transcendental logic’s problems point to such a solution, the
latter’s attainment would cancel the entire transcendental enterprise.
Transcendental logic rests upon the premise that the conditions of knowing can
be antecedently investigated without introducing actual knowledge claims
about particular objects. Knowing can have transcendental conditions, juridical
conditions of knowing rather than conditioned objects of knowledge, only if
the object of knowing can be distinguished from the structure of knowing. If
transcendental logic were to become self-determining, so that the knowledge it
examines were the same knowing exercised by the transcendental logician, the
distinction between knowledge and its object would disappear, making
impossible any investigation of knowing prior to that of its object. This leaves
transcendental logic at an impasse. Either it accepts the given character of the
transcendental condition and succumbs to the reliance upon givenness it seeks
to repudiate or it eliminates that element and annuls itself. However it
proceeds, transcendental logic cannot supply the self-legitimation of reason
philosophy demands.
Systematic Logic and Self-Determination
Although the problems of transcendental logic lead it to the brink of collapse,

this does not render hopeless reason’s quest for self-justification. Together with
the failure of prescriptive formal logic, the impasse of transcendental logic
teaches instead that philosophy cannot be presuppositionless and self-
grounding if it relies on either given or determined determinacy to supply
reason with its order and validity. So long as reasoning is stamped with any
residue of givenness, it remains shackled to an assumed content that deprives it

of the unconditioned universality needed to provide justification and transform
opinion into knowledge. In demonstrating this through its own demise,
transcendental logic points beyond itself to an alternative prescriptive logic that
does not succumb to such problems.
This is systematic logic, whose mandate follows directly from the central
dilemma of the transcendental turn. In order for transcendental logic to avoid
dogmatically asserting the conditions of knowing, it had to become self-
determining. It could not do this, however, without canceling itself by
eliminating the givenness of the transcendental conditions, which alone allows
them to be what they are, the antecedent determiners of objectivity. This
suggests that prescriptive logic must indeed conceive reason as self-determined
to escape dogmatism, but that this solution is achievable only when reason has
neither any privileged given nor determiner at its root.
Systematic logic takes up this challenge and attempts to work out a logic
with no primitive terms or principles. In undertaking this endeavor, pioneered
by Hegel in his Science o f Logic, systematic logic makes manifest that
presuppositionlessness, self-grounding, and unconditioned universality all
consist in self-determination. This may sound novel, both before Hegel and
after legions of Hegel misinterpreters. Nevertheless, the plausibility of
developing prescriptive logic as self-determined determinacy gains credibility
once self-determination is examined in light of what reason must be to justify
its own privileged role in seeking truth.
First, self-determination enjoys or, indeed, is identical with
presuppositionlessness in that what is neither given nor determined but self-
determined rests on nothing antecedent to itself. Although self-determination
gives itself determinacy, it has no givenness whatever. A determiner of
determined determinacy, such as the choosing will,7 cannot fail to have a
character prior to its positing of something other than itself. Otherwise there is
no determinate positor in a position to posit something else. Self-determination,
by contrast, cannot have any form or content until it has determined itself. If it
did, it would fail to be se/^determined and instead possess a nature given prior
to its activity, an activity that would thereby fail to be fully self-informing.
7 The choosing will has a nature consisting in not only an animal organism
possessing self-consciousness, but the faculty of choice on which all decisions are
predicated. Although individuals must have choice to engage in self-determination, in
acting autonomously, they give themselves artificial, conventional agencies, such as
that of property owner, morally accountable agent, spouse, member of civil society,
and self-governing citizen, whose character is determined through their actions
towards one another.
Instead of falling prey to such heteronomy, self-determination exhibits a

freedom from givenness so radical that it can only be conceived to issue from
nothing at all. In other words, self-determination must begin from sheer
indeterminacy, for otherwise it would rest on a foundation that it has not
determined, leaving it dependent rather than free.
Secondly, self-determined determinacy is self-grounding insofar as
whatever form or content it has is a product of itself. Because self-
determination proceeds from nothing and generates its own order and
substance without reference to anything else, all its aspects and relations rest
upon what it has determined itself to be, which is nothing other than self-
determined determinacy. What self-determination actually is, however, can
only be determined at the conclusion of its own process of determination, since
until then, the “content” of self-determined determinacy is not yet at hand.
Conversely, the “form” or “logic” of its determining is also available no sooner
than the conclusion of self-determination, insofar as the ordering principle of
the content is what has here given itself its own determination. Indeed, to speak
of a “form” and “content” of self-determination is inappropriate since neither
can be distinguished from the other. The content of self-determination is its
own self-ordering, just as its form is the same content that orders itself.
All this presuppositionless, self-grounding melding of form and content
signifies that self-determination is unconditionally universal or, more precisely,
unconditioned universality itself. Because self-determined determinacy owes its
entire character to itself, nothing conditions it. Even though it has a determinate
content, what is particular about it is neither limited by any given circumstance
nor relative to anything other than itself. Self-determination instantiates only
itself and it is this independent individuality that gives it a universality free of
all conditions.
The unity of self-determination thereby has a very special relation to the
particular content of which it is the “self’. With respect to this its own
determinacy, self-determination is universal because the developed content is
nothing but its instantiation. The self-identity of the subject of self-
determination is not like an abstract quality that inheres in individuals
possessing further unrelated character. The self-determined self instead has a
universality indistinguishable from its particular content, for it has its free unity
by being the very same self-determined determinacy in which that content
consists. Such universality is concrete, not abstract, containing every aspect of
its particularization within its unity. Accordingly, its particularization is a
universal particular, containing the very process of self-determination that it
instantiates. If individuality consists in a unification of universal and particular,
where the uniqueness of its particular content comprises the general identity of
the individual, then self-determination exhibits individuality or, rather, self-
determination is the determinacy of individuality.8

One might suspect that ascribing self-determined determinacy the requisite
features of presuppositionlessness, self-grounding and unconditioned
universality presupposes what self-determination is as well as what philosophy
must be to think the truth. If, however, one simply makes no assumptions,
eliminates all givens and given determiners, and dispenses with all formal and
transcendental logic, one ends up with self-determination and with it,
everything enabling self-justification.
To begin without any assumptions is to begin with nothing at all - with
indeterminacy. If anything were to follow from nothing without illicit
introduction of any given content or given process of determination, it would
have to arise from indeterminacy in a totally self-generated way. Since nothing
else would be available to provide it with character, what it is would have to be
self-determined. Moreover, it would not be the self-determination of any given
substrate but a self-determination issuing from indeterminacy, incorporating
nothing to start with. It would thus have to be self-determination per se.
Resting on no determinate foundation, it would then be radically self-
grounding. Having no conditions, it would be unconditionally universal.
Finally, possessing a character it owes exclusively to itself, it would be
individual.
Admittedly, even if the only thing that could arise from indeterminacy were
self-determination, this would not guarantee that anything can follow from it.
One can well object that beginning from a presuppositionless starting point
invites theoretical anarchy and that without given premises and some given
procedure, nothing at all could ever possibly result.
Proceeding from indeterminacy by developing self-determination does not,
however, amount to conceptual chaos. Foregoing reliance upon all given
principles of method and all assumptions about topic is not equivalent to giving
free reign to arbitrariness. Allowing both method and content to issue from the
caprice of the theorist would hardly be congruent with presuppositionless
science and self-determination. Instead it would comprise a science issuing
from a privileged determiner, the theoretical anarchist, and would therefore
consist not in self-determination but in an externally determined subject matter
owing its form and content to the arbitrary stipulating of that theorizer.
While presuppositionlessness and self-determination are not synonymous
with conceptual anarchy, there can be no positive criteria forjudging whether a
particular candidate for systematic logic has properly developed its putatively
presuppositionless, self-grounding subject matter. Any application of positive
criteria must be precluded since it would involve standards of method and
For a detailed systematic treatment of this connection see Chapter 4.

content given externally instead of being generated within what is to be judged.

Such criteria could have no validity for they would be or rest upon
assumptions, unlike bonafide elements of the self-determination from
indeterminacy that presuppositionlessness could alone entail.
The lack of positive criteria forjudging systematic logic does not rob it of
necessity nor leave it beyond critical validation. What allows for theoretical
necessity in the first place is just the liberation from prior standards. All
criterialogical knowing is victim to skeptical challenge due to the dilemma of
evaluating truth on the basis of given criteria, which, as merely given, are
always open to question. A candidate for systematic logic can be evaluated
instead in a purely negative fashion by ensuring that none of its determinations
owe their character or order of presentation to extraneously given material or
an extraneous determiner.
Excluding all appeal to external criteria and procedures is tantamount to
following the purely immanent development by which self-determined
determinacy would constitute itself from an indeterminate starting point. The
logic that presents this development would be systematic in that the order of
terms would be bound up with their content. Instead of introducing topics by
external fiat, turning arbitrarily from one to any other, presuppositionless logic
would systematically follow an ordering dictated by how each determination
along the way transforms itself into some specific successor that builds a
further stage in the self-development issuing from indeterminacy. Indeed, the
entire development would comprise a system in its own right, where each
element has its proper place as a component in the immanent process by which
the whole constitutes itself.
These programmatic considerations may suggest how self-determined
determinacy could be developed presuppositionlessly without theoretical
anarchy. They do not, however, indicate how any move can be made beyond
indeterminacy to something determinate. Why there should be determinacy is
not yet answered. Nevertheless, that question can only be asked by systematic
logic. Any theorizing that instead operates with given determinacy takes
determinacy for granted and so cannot account for this most basic and
pervasive assumption. So long as determinacy is presupposed, dogmatism
cannot be escaped.
Systematic Logic and the Question of Determinacy
The first part of an answer to the question of determinacy can be found in the
opening argument of Hegel’s Science o f Logic, a work that still is the only
comprehensive attempt to present the presuppositionless, self-grounding
development of self-determined determinacy in which systematic logic

consists. Tracing being, nothing, and becoming as the successive terms with
which Logic unfolds, Hegel offers the initial steps in an account of determinacy
that takes no determinacy for granted.9
This might seem preposterous, given the all too determinate stature that
seems to bar being from figuring as the indeterminate starting point of
systematic logic. After all, being has perennially served ontology as the
fundamental foundation common to everything that is, inviting competing
descriptions. Nonetheless, every attempt to give being some determinate
character falls into the dilemma of characterizing being as such in terms of
some particular being. No matter how legions of ontologists may have tried to
give being determinacy, they can only escape this dilemma by granting being
utter indeterminacy. For this reason, Hegel has aptly chosen “being” to name
the indeterminacy with which systematic logic begins, just as what follows
confirms how he has appropriately chosen “nothing” and “becoming” to
designate what develops from being. This development gives a first taste of
how systematic logic departs so radically from the foundational reasoning of
formal and transcendental logic.
An insurmountable dilemma seems to bar the way. An advance from
indeterminacy to something determinate cannot be caused or grounded or have
any reason behind it at all. To search for any would impute a definite character
to indeterminacy - being a determining principle. This would violate the
constitutive nothingness of indeterminacy and reintroduce an element of
givenness precluding presuppositionlessness. The only alternative seems
hopelessly paradoxical. Because indeterminacy can have nothing determinate
underlying it to serve as a mediating reason, if anything follows from
indeterminacy it must arise utterly immediately without any grounds for doing
so.
The proper answer to the question, “Why is there determinacy?”, is
therefore that there is and can be no reason, for any attempt to assign one
presupposes determinacy by treating indeterminacy as if it were a definite
determiner. All that can be offered in answer is an account of how
indeterminacy gives rise to something else. The real dilemma consists not in
being unable to find a reason for the development, but in even seeking one in
the first place. What follows from indeterminacy must do so immediately,
which is to say, without reason and without being determined by anything.
Analogously, what follows from indeterminacy must be uncaused,
9 G.W.F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik: Die Lehre vom Sein (1832), ed. Hans-
Jiirgen Gawoll (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1990), pp. 71-2; G.W.F. Hegel,
Science o f Logic, A. V. Miller, trans. (New York: Humanities Press, 1969), pp. 82-3.
ungrounded and undetermined in any way. It must be whatever it is without

involving contrast to anything determinate and without containing any element
of givenness, which, having no ground in indeterminacy, could only be present
by some illicit introduction.
With all recourse to givens and given determiners excluded, what alone can
follow from indeterminacy is nothing, which can only arise immediately from
indeterminacy. When Hegel moves from “being” to “nothing” in his Science o f
Logic, he is tracing just this groundless passage from indeterminacy to an
indistinguishable nothingness.
Admittedly, the groundless advent of nothing hardly signifies an emergence
of determinacy. It does, however, engender something more than itself and the
sheer indeterminacy from which it cannot be differentiated. With nothing one
has a second category that, because it cannot be differentiated from
indeterminacy (or “being” as Hegel aptly identifies it), immediately passes over
into indeterminacy. Indeed, since there can be no intermediary between nothing
and the indeterminacy from which it immediately arises, nothing is at once
indeterminacy without any passage at all. Similarly, being no less passes over
into nothing, for its indeterminacy is utterly identical to what alone can
immediately follow from it without further support.
As a whole, then, the groundless succession of nothing from being
simultaneously involves the immediate transitions of being into nothing and
nothing into being. This process has nothing determinate within it among its
component elements. Nonetheless, as a whole it comprises something
distinguishable from the twin indeterminacies figuring within it. Consequently,
this whole process can be separately designated “becoming” and comprise
something distinguishable from being and nothing, out of whose transitions
into one another it is composed. In this regard becoming is determinate, and,
more significantly, it is a determinacy that issues from nothing determinate at
all. Consequently, the move from being to nothing to becoming that Hegel
follows accounts for how there is determinacy without taking any determinacy
for granted.
Although this may suggest how systematic logic can get off the ground,
establishing determinacies through which self-determination constitutes itself,
it leaves unclear what relation the ensuing systematic logic has to the self-
justification of reason and the quest for truth.
If systematic logic presents any argument at all, it is no more in the manner
of the deductive reasoning of formal logic than in that of the constitution of
transcendental logic. Although systematic logic may not be predetermined by
any antecedent motivation, the historical motive for taking it seriously lies in
recognition that the unjustifiable premises underlying both deductive reasoning
and transcendental construction prevent either from serving as paradigms of
philosophical thought. Systematic logic may make use of propositions in

explicating self-determination, but what it presents cannot be guided or
legitimated by any propositional calculus, rules of syllogism, or logic of
discovery.
Emancipated from all appeal to the given, systematic logic can proceed
neither merely analytically nor synthetically. To be systematic, logic can no
more analyze what is already present in a given subject matter than judge
synthetically how given concepts are connected to one another in virtue of
something external to them. Instead, as Hegel suggests,10 systematic logic must
proceed analytically and synthetically at once, insofar as everything it develops
will be both contained in the ultimate determinacy that is determining itself and
not yet given in the preceding determinacies, which are stages in the self-
determination proceeding through and incorporating them.
The “argument” of systematic logic will accordingly reside in the
completely self-grounded character of what it presents. In the absence of any
predetermined methodology or predetermined topic, the justification of the
emergent ordering and content will have to lie in nothing other than how both
owe their determinacy entirely to themselves. So long as they do, their
unfolding achieves the perennial aim of all philosophical investigation, the aim
of accounting within itself for every aspect of its own inquiry. Since what is
offered is self-determination, systematic logic will succeed in attaining self-
justification by presenting the logic or determinacy of self-justification itself.
Nonetheless, systematic logic cannot claim to be a logic of thinking or a
logic of reality. Systematic logic presents self-determination per se rather than
the self-determination of a given content, be it of reality or, more specifically,
of mind. Consequently, the categories of systematic logic are not categories of
reality anymore than of thought. They are instead categories of determinacy
without further qualification. Possessing this unprecedented formality,
provided by liberation from the given, systematic logic is neither an ontology
of true being nor an epistemology of true knowledge. How, then, can
systematic logic contribute to reason’s self-justification and the attainment of
truth? Even if systematic logic uncovers in self-determination the structure of
presuppositionless, unconditioned universality, and self-grounding, how does
this solve philosophy’s preeminent dilemma?
By itself, systematic logic provides a seemingly paradoxical answer to these
questions. By developing self-determination as presuppositionless, self-
grounding determinacy, systematic logic indicates that the whole project of
10 G.W.F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik: Die Lehre vom Begriff (1816), ed.
Hans-Jurgen Gawoll (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1994), p. 300; Hegel, Science o f
Logic, p. 838.
prescriptive logic is misguided so long as it seeks the self-justification of

reason’s determinacy without first investigating determinacy per se. Failing
this most basic investigation, any theory of reason or reality succumbs to the
dogmatism of taking determinacy for granted. Systematic logic avoids this error
by taking the problem of presuppositionlessness and self-justification to its
radical extreme and providing a theory of determinacy in which no given is
assumed. In so doing, systematic logic does not prescribe rules of thought or
principles of reality, but instead conceives the true categories of determinacy.
Their truth resides not in any correspondence to reality or thought but in the
presuppositionlessness and unconditioned universality they possess as elements
of self-determined determinacy. Only with them at hand is it possible to
advance to a conception of reason and reality free from the hold of unexamined
opinion. That conception, however, lies beyond the scope of systematic logic
insofar as reality in general and thinking in particular incorporate determinacy
with further qualification.11 For this reason, systematic logic is only a first, yet
necessary step in philosophy’s quest for truth and self-justification.1
11 It is in light of this that Hegel does not address reason and philosophy
thematically in the Science o f Logic. He treats them instead as topics of
Realphilosophie, properly conceivable in the Philosophy of Spirit. The latter
presupposes both systematic logic and the Philosophy of Nature, insofar as mind
involves determinacy in general as well as the nature of an animal organism interacting
with its biosphere.
Chapter 2
Method in Systematic Logic
No problem appears more perplexing in systematic logic than that of method.

Insofar as systematic logic investigates valid thinking, any methodological
orientation seems self-defeating. Systematic logic can hardly presuppose how
thought should be developed without begging the question, yet any
employment of a determinate method seems to do just that. By conforming to
any given procedure, systematic logic risks forfeiting the autonomy that reason
must retain to examine itself without yielding to unquestioned dogma. Yet if
systematic logic must proceed without any given, preconceived method, can its
advance escape arbitrariness?
This dilemma haunts any reader of the pioneering attempt to develop
systematic logic, Hegel’s Science o f Logic. Although Hegel continually intones
the necessity of the passage from one category to the next, anyone seeking a
methodological key is bound to be frustrated.
Hegel invites this frustration by failing to supply in advance anything that
could count as a unitary doctrine of method. Instead he offers episodic
reflections at different points along the way, whose compatibility, let alone
justification, is far from obvious. The first of these accounts, scattered in the
two introductory discussions, “General Notion of Logic” and “With What Must
Science Begin?”, lists general features that apply throughout the method’s
application.1A second account, surfacing in the remarks preceding the Logics
of Being, of Essence and of the Concept, describes how each section has its
own manner of advance, suggesting that the method operates differently in
each logical sphere.*2 Finally, Hegel provides a third account at the very end of
Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik: DieLehrevom Sein (1832), pp. 25,38,59-62;

Hegel, Science o f Logic, pp. 43, 54, 70-72.
2 In these passages, Hegel intimates that whereas the categories of being pass
over into one another, those of essence do not undergo transitions, but are posited,
whereas those of the concept develop. See Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik: Die Lehre
vom Sein (1832), p. 71; Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik: Die Lehre vom Wesen (1813),
pp. 4-5; Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik: Die Lehre vom Begriff (1816), pp. 28-30;
Hegel, Science o f Logic, pp. 81, 390-91, 596-7.
the Logic, where he first addresses the method in a self-consciously systematic

fashion as a topic falling within logic under the heading of the Absolute Idea.
This final analysis describes a three-stage method, unrelated to the division into
logics of being, essence and the concept, that hardly seems to correspond to
either of the two earlier accounts.3
The most familiar of these accounts is the introductoiy description of six
general features of method, according to which 1) the form of logical
development is in unity with its content; 2) the subject matter unfolds
immanently, as a self-development; 3) logical science proceeds by means of
determinate negation; 4) the movement of the categories is circular, such that
the advance from the starting point is equally a regress towards the true ground
on which the development rests; 5) the determination of the categories is
neither merely analytic nor synthetic, but both at once; and 6) the development
has its own method as its final result.
Although these characterizations are first listed without much ado, Hegel
does outline a dual strategy for confirming whether they are the fundamental
features of valid method. This lies in the twin discussions that introduce the
systematic argument of the Science o f Logic. In the first, entitled, “Notion of
Logic in General”, Hegel considers the nature of logic and examines what
method must be adopted to permit logical science to achieve its aims. In the
second, entitled, “With What Must the Science Being?”, he analyzes how
philosophy can be undertaken without being burdened by presuppositions, as
in any appeal to foundations. As Hegel shows, these problems have one and the
same solution, whereby satisfying the demands o f logic equally allows
philosophy to overcome foundationalism. This convergence not only makes
intelligible why Hegel calls that with which philosophy begins a “Science of
Logic”, but also provides the key arguments forjudging the legitimacy of his
preliminary descriptions of method.
By considering each converging path in turn, we can resolve the initial
perplexity of method in systematic logic, and pave the way for examining how
reason unfolds.
Method As Determined From the Requirements of Logic
Logic consists in the thinking of thinking. Although logic may be called a

formal science, in that it is not a thinking about particular objects of thought, as
Hegel points out, logic has a subject matter all its own: the determination of
3 Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik: Die Lehre vom Begriff (1816), pp. 287-300;
Hegel, Science of Logic, pp. 827-38.
M ethod in Systematic Logic 21
thought.4 For just this reason, the form of logic has a special relation to its
content, setting logical science apart from other disciplines.
Since all other sciences conceive something other than thinking, the form in
which their content is presented, namely, scientific thought, is different from
their subject matter. This leaves their method something that cannot be
established within their own investigations. Nonlogical sciences are therefore
compelled to take their method for granted, as something that must already be
at hand in order for their investigations to proceed. Because, however, the
method of nonlogical sciences must be determined independently of the
investigation of their particular subject matters, having the method in hand
does not bring with it any content. Hence, the subject matter other sciences
address must equally be given by acceptance of some concepts or other, since
otherwise there would be no determinate content for their given method to
address.5
In logic this distinction between form and content is overcome to the degree
that logic consists in the thinking of thinking, or self-thinking thought.
Whereas form and content fall asunder in other inquiries, the form and content
of logical science are one and the same: thinking that thinks itself.
In this respect, logic proceeds upon the overcoming of the distinction of
consciousness that Hegel claims is the prerequisite for systematic philosophy.6
This distinction, whose overcoming is purportedly achieved by the
Phenomenology o f Spirit's immanent critique of consciousness’s foundational
knowing,7 consists in the differentiation of knowing from its object, where the
standard of truth resides in the independent given comprising knowing’s
referent. So long as this distinction persists, knowing remains caught in the
bind of representational cognition, never able to transcend its own
representations and secure direct access to its object, as necessary to confirm
their truth. By contrast, in logic, the object of inquiry, pure thought (that is,
thought that thinks itself) is indistinguishable from the thinking cognition in
which logic engages. Logical science therefore lacks the appeal to independent
givens constitutive of the representational framework of consciousness. Given
how the thoughts of logic refer to nothing but themselves, there can be no
4 Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik: Die Lehre vom Sein (1832), p. 25; Hegel,
Science o f Logic, p. 43.
5 Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik: Die Lehre vom Sein (1832), p. 25. Hegel,
question of logic seeking their truth in some distinct criteria. For just this
reason there is nothing logical at hand to refer to until logical thinking has
gotten underway. Since this eliminates any possibility of drawing a distinction
between reference and referent, logical thought is nonrepresentational, lacking
the constitutive distinction defining representational cognition.8
Hence, if the method of logic is the ordering of the content of logic, then the
logical method will be at one with what it presents, in expression of the unity
of form and content in logic. Because of this underlying unity, the
methodological form of the thinking of thinking is only established in the
determination of what thinking is by and within logical science. Consequently,
the method of logic will not be conceivable apart from the content it orders. If
anything like a doctrine of logical method were to be sought, it could only be
obtained from the completed development of logic’s subject matter. Since the
logical unfolding of thought presents what is at one with its mode of
presentation, only with completion of logic is the form in which thinking is
thought fully at hand. Instead of being given at the start, as something distinct
and independent of its topic, the method of logic can only be determinable as a
result of the full exposition of the content logic presents.
This allows logical science to make an absolute beginning, avoiding the
dependence upon a given method and given content characterizing other
sciences. Because the unity of form and content in logic prevents logical
method from being determined prior to the completed exposition of the content
of logical thought, logic begins without any antecedently defined method.
Similarly, since what logic is about has no independent being apart from
logical thought, logic begins without any antecedently determined subject
matter. By contrast, other sciences cannot make an absolute beginning.
Because what they address is different from their theorizing, the form of their
theorizing can no more provide the content it addresses than the subject matter
examined can provide the form of its own theoretical presentation. As a result,
the subject matter of other sciences must be independently given at the outset
in order to be available, just as their method must be independently determined
apart from thinking the subject matter of their particular science.9 Logic, by
contrast, begins absolutely in that neither its content nor its method has any
given character at the outset of logical investigation. Not before and outside but
8 This does not mean that logical thought is devoid of meaning. It is still about
something, and, in that sense, intentional, even if what it is about is itself and not an
independent given.
9 Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik: Die Lehre vom Sein (1832), p. 25. Hegel,
Method in Systematic Logic 23
only in and through its thinking of thinking do logic’s unitary topic and
procedure get determined.
As a consequence, logic must proceed immanently, as a self-development.
Since it has no given form or content, logic must generate its own subject
matter and ordering, unless external interventions supply it with either along
the way. The latter option, however, is ruled out by the unity of form and
content defining logic’s thinking of thinking. If any terms were externally
introduced or externally ordered, the thought under examination would no
longer be undertaking its own investigation. Instead, the train of logical thought
would be broken and destroyed by a thinking that determines the content
and/or order of the science yet stands outside its purview. To escape this
outcome, logic must have an immanent development, where both what is
thought and how it is thought are determined by nothing but the course of
logical thinking itself. Insofar as logic develops a thinking that thinks itself, its
development cannot fail to be immanent, for it is nothing but a self-
development, where what is presented provides its own exposition.
It follows that logic is circular in that each advance represents a regress
towards the ground on which the whole development rests. As a self-
development uniting form and content, logical thinking only arrives at the
completed determination of both what is under way developing itself and the
order of its exposition at the conclusion of its working. Only then is the subject
matter of the development determined, just as only then is the ordering
principle or method of the advance at hand. As we have seen, both are what
they are only as results of the development leading to and constituting them.
Since the preceding development is nothing more than the succession of stages
by which logical thought both constitutes and orders itself, each advance is a
move towards the ground that determines and contains the prior stages as what
they are: elements in the self-constitution of logical thought. This ground is the
totality of logic, which only arises as a result of the completed development.
Hence, logic is not caught in a holism of coherence, where the truth of each
category is defined in terms of the given totality within which it resides. Nor is
logical thought involved in rebuilding the ship in which it is already afloat. In
either case, the content of logic would be determined by a framework
encompassing and lying beyond it, leaving categories always determined by
something falling outside them all. The unity of form and content would again
be disrupted. The determining of logic would not reside in its own exposition,
but in an external context that could never become subject to logical
investigation, since it would always be presupposed by any logical thought.
Logical thought escapes the dilemmas of holism because the whole to which
the categories belong is not something given at the outset of the development,
providing an omnipresent determining context, but rather a result that only
contains and orders them at the end of its self-development. On the one hand,
the totality that proves itself to be the ground of the preceding development can
be completely transparent to logical thought, for it is precisely what that
development has consisted of thinking through. On the other hand, this totality
is not some irreducible given that thought must accept as its unquestionable
foundation. Because logical thought arrives at the conception of this totality
without submitting its labors to any external guide, this resultant whole is not
an ungrounded assumption. On the contrary, it owes every aspect of itself to
the development leading to it. Because this development is the self-constitution
of self-thinking thought in its entirety, neither resting on anything else nor
following any foreign principle, the totality of logical thought is self-
grounding, mediated by nothing but its own unfolding.
Hence, the pure thought of logic is just as much unmediated as mediated. It
is unmediated to the extent that, as a whole, nothing else determines it. On the
other hand, it is equally mediated, since, instead of being given, in the manner
of a static form that requires an independent thinker to posit it and relate it to
others, self-thinking thought is what it is only through the mediation of the
categorial development of logic.
Similarly, logical thought is at once analytic and synthetic. The self-thinking
of thought is analytic insofar as every logical category is contained in the
resultant totality comprising both the ordering principle and subject of logical
science. At the same time, self-thinking thought is synthetic in that each new
category is not contained in those that precede it. If it were, the order and
content of the ensuing development would already be given in the first
category, rendering the method and topic of logic matters that logical science
must take for granted rather than establish. Self-thinking thought is able to
avoid presupposing both, and thereby retain a synthetic dimension, precisely
because its pure thinking arrives at a complete determination of its method and
subject matter only as the result of its labors. This equally allows self-thinking
thought to retain an analytic dimension because, in arriving at its method and
content, it incorporates the entire preceding development.
Finally, in following an advance no less analytic than synthetic, self-
thinking thought can be said to proceed by means of determinate negation.
Insofar as each successive category supplants its predecessor with a
nonderivative content, it negates what precedes it, yielding something other.
Yet, to the degree that it equally incorporates its predecessors as constitutive
elements of its nonderivative determination, its negation of its predecessor is
determinate, in that the otherness it opposes to the former is equally determined
in reference to it. Since each successive category leading to the final totality of
self-thinking thought undergoes this dual negation and incorporation of what
Method in Systematic Logic 25
follows it, logical development can thus be described as being ordered by

determinate negation.
This might suggest that logic is subject to a formal ordering principle
distinct from its content of self-thinking thought. The prior analysis of how
determinate negation rests on the equally analytic and synthetic character of the
advance should, however, indicate that the unity of form and content is the very
precondition for determinate negation playing any role. Because determinate
negation ties how categories succeed one another to what they are, it is an
ordering principle that cannot be detached from a development where form and
content are thoroughly intertwined.10
The Reflexivity of Prescriptive Logic
All these ramifications of the demands of logic very neatly correspond to the
six features cited in Hegel’s first account of the method of his Science of
Logic. But do they really follow from the concept of logic itself? After all,
many different types of logic have been pursued. Some are merely descriptive,
restricted to describing how thought in general has factually operated, whereas
others are prescriptive, seeking to prescribe how valid thought should proceed.
And within this broad division, logics have been developed that are formal,
transcendental, or systematic. Although in every case logic involves a thinking
about thinking, it is far from true that the thinking each logic engages in is
identical to the thinking it is describing or prescribing.
In fact, formal logic and transcendental logic, to take the most widely
practiced types, cannot possibly achieve a unity of form and content. The rules
of inference that formal logic provides as the canon of thought cannot be
described or prescribed by their own laws of entailment. Formal logic cannot
practice what it preaches because all entailment ultimately proceeds from some
indemonstrable given premise, which can only be known by some
nondemonstrative knowing, whereas establishing rules of inference by means
of themselves would beg the question. Similarly, transcendental logic cannot
transcendentally constitute its own transcendental arguments. Because
transcendental logic seeks to determine some privileged structure of cognition
comprising the prior conditions by which objectivity is known, transcendental
logic must always define those structure directly rather than conceive them as
10 This is largely what Hegel’s analysis of the method in the absolute Idea
demonstrates when it shows how the determinate negation by which logic advances
expands into the whole system of logical determination. See Hegel, Wissenschaft der
Logik: Die Lehre vom Begriff (1816), p. 300; Hegel, Science of Logic, p. 838.
determined by themselves like all other objects of knowledge. If it tried the

latter route, it would either have to take what they are for granted or transform
them into self-determined structures, eliminating the distinction between
knowing and its object that first allows for the conditions of knowledge to be
examined prior to an examination of particular objects of knowledge."
If an identity of form and content is not and cannot be achieved by formal
and transcendental logics, this does not mean that it is not entailed by the
concept of logic, understood as a prescriptive science of valid thought. Insofar
as logic concerns not describing how individuals think but prescribing how
they should think, logic will be valid only if what it establishes as the logic of
valid thought is equally the logic ordering its own investigation. If instead the
thinking logic employs is not one with the logic of valid thought it presents, the
exposition of thought by logic will not be valid. Logical science therefore
cannot be valid unless it achieves a unity of form and content. Since such a
unity escapes every effort of formal and transcendental logics, they can never
successfully prescribe how we should think.
A true science of logic must exhibit all the ramifications of this unity so far
discussed. First, since a properly prescriptive logic aims at establishing what
valid thinking is, its own method cannot be taken for granted at the start.
Instead, logical method falls within logical investigation, comprising none
other than its ultimate subject matter. Since the method of logic is therefore at
once the form and content of its investigation, logical science must begin with
no antecedently given method or subject matter. If either just its method or just
its content were given, the offered candidate of valid thought would differ from
its exposition, undermining the legitimacy of each. If, on the other hand, both
its method and subject matter were antecedently determined, the science of
logic would accomplish nothing in its own right, leaving the putative form and
content of valid thinking arbitrary assumptions, postulated outside of logical
investigation. To be worthy of the name, logical science must rather arrive at
both its method and subject matter as a result of its own labors. Hence, the very
concept of prescriptive logic does entail that it begin absolutely, without any
preconception of its form or content. Its own method and subject matter must
instead be established at the very end of its investigation, at which point it
completes what comprises its self-exposition of valid thinking.
It seems paradoxical that the idea of prescriptive logic would entail a
development of thought whose topic and ordering are totally undetermined by
any antecedent, independently given principle. How can a logic whose form
and content have no prior determination be entailed by anything at all? The1
11 As we have seen in Chapter 1, this predicament leaves transcendental logic

unable to escape the dogmatic appeal to the given that it seeks to overcome.
paradox disappears once it is recognized that the concept of prescriptive logic

has no further positive filling apart from the preconception-free conceptual
development that alone can bring it to realization, or, properly speaking, self-
realization. This recognition need not be at hand to legitimate the science of
logic. Rather, it is something the science itself establishes at its end by fully
determining the idea of prescriptive logic and demonstrating that it is an idea
that determines itself.
These considerations of the requirements inherent in logic thus give support
to Hegel’s claims that the form of logical development is in unity with its
content, that the science of logic consists in an immanent self-development,
that it exhibits determinate negation and is equally analytic and synthetic, and
that its movement of categories takes the form of a circle, where every advance
is a retreat to the ultimate ground having the determination of method as its
final result.
Let us grant that these strictures of method are all necessary fulfillments of
the demands of logical science. Are they, however, methodological features not
just of logic, but of philosophical thought in general? As Hegel makes clear in
his other introductory discussion, “With What Must the Science Begin?”, the
Science of Logic is concerned not just with bringing logic to completion but
with allowing philosophy to achieve its constitutive aims. Do philosophy’s
requirements entail the very same methodological prescriptions inherent in
logical science?
The Method of Philosophy as the Method of Logic
In asking, with what must the science of philosophy begin?, Hegel ponders
how philosophy can overcome foundationalism, that is, begin without
presuppositions and achieve the complete theoretical self-responsibility that
philosophical thought needs to rise above doxology. The challenge is twofold.
Negatively speaking, philosophy musts liberate itself from reliance upon
dogmatic givens, be they contents or procedures that have not already been
established within and by philosophical investigation. Positively speaking,
philosophy must ground itself, legitimating its subject matter and method by its
own means alone. These demands are two sides of the same coin. To proceed
without foundations, philosophy must independently establish all its own terms
and method, just as to be self-grounding and self-justifying, philosophy must
be thoroughly free of foundations.
If we examine these dual requirements in light of Hegel’s analysis of the
starting point of philosophical discourse, we find two coordinate features. On
the one hand, philosophy must start with no givens, since to start with any
determinate content or method involves presuppositions whose legitimacy has

not been established within philosophy. To proceed without foundations,
philosophy can thus only begin with indeterminacy or being, signifying the
exclusion of any assumptions concerning either the subject matter or procedure
of philosophy.
On the other hand, if philosophy is to proceed from indeterminacy and
ground itself, its conceptual development must be self-determining. Since the
content philosophy presents cannot derive from any source other than what
philosophical thinking sanctions and since the method by which its content is
ordered must equally be established by philosophy, both what and how
philosophy thinks must be determined in and through philosophical thought.
Hence, philosophical reason must be genuinely autonomous, achieving not just
the negative freedom of liberty from external ordering but also the positive
freedom of self-determination.
Taking these coordinate features together, whereby philosophy starts with
indeterminacy and then exhibits self-determination, it follows that philosophy
will commence by presenting nothing but self-determination per se, which, it
should already be clear, amounts to the logic of self-grounding. Because
philosophy must begin with indeterminacy, its ensuing self-determination
cannot be the self-determination of some further substrate, such as any
independently given notions of reality or thought. If it were, philosophy would
rest upon prephilosophical assumptions and fail to achieve either its negative
freedom of presuppositionlessness or its positive freedom of self-grounding.
Hence, the very autonomy of reason requires that it proceed from
indeterminacy rather than from any determinate foundation. Little else could be
expected, given how what is genuinely self-determined has no determination
prior to what it determines itself to be.
Granted that the answer to how philosophy must begin is that philosophical
reason starts with indeterminacy and presents self-determination per se, it
remains to be shown how this dual prescription entails the six features of
Hegel’s introductory account of method.
To begin with, does it entail a unity of form and content? Is foundation-free
discourse, proceeding from indeterminacy and presenting the logic of self-
determination or self-grounding, a conceptual development whose content and
ordering coincide? Hegel suggests as much in observing how philosophers had
first considered the principle of philosophy as if it merely concerned what
content should be conceived, but had now recognized that the act of knowing
was essential to truth. The method of philosophy must accordingly be united
with its content and its form united with its principle, so that what is first for
thinking also be first in the path of thinking.12 If philosophy begins with

indeterminacy to be free of foundations and to provide the only admissible
commencement for a development determined by nothing but itself, then no
determinate method can already be operative. The indeterminate content with
which philosophy begins is therefore equally indeterminate in form. Contra
Kierkegaard,13 the beginning not only begins with immediacy but begins
immediately.14
Moreover, since what proceeds from indeterminacy can only be self-
determination per se, its ordering is a self-ordering, where the succession of
categories is equally rooted in what they present. The content of the ensuing
development just as much determines the form of its own presentation as its
ordering is inseparable from its content. Because what is being determined is
self-determination per se, how it is being determined is identical to what it is. If
instead the form of exposition were distinct from its content, the content would
be ordered by something else, undermining its self-determined character, just
as the determining principle of the content would no longer coincide with the
identity of “self ’ of the latter, as self-determination requires.
If this suggests how the demands of philosophy entail the same unity of
form and content required by logic, it equally entails that the method emerge as
the final term of philosophy’s initial undertaking. The ordering principle or
method of self-determination per se consists in nothing less than the “self’ or
subject matter that is under way determining itself. Consequently, the ordering
of what philosophy first presents is not at hand until self-determination has
completed its own development, at once establishing what it is and how it is
determined. As the unity of form and content already implies, only when the
content of self-determination has constituted itself is its form or method equally
established.
This means that philosophical discourse, like logic, will proceed
immanently as a self-development whose every advance is equally a retreat
towards its ground. Insofar as philosophy must begin with indeterminacy and
offer self-determination per se, it consists in a self-development whereby the
13 Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1974), pp. 101-2.
14 For a discussion of why this immediacy is not disrupted by the mediation of the
Phenomenology o f Spirit, see Richard Dien Winfield, “The Route to Foundation-Free
Systematic Philosophy”, Philosophical Forum, Vo\. 15, No. 3 (Spring 1984), pp. 337
ff; also in Richard Dien Winfield, Overcoming Foundations: Studies in Systematic
Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989) p. 19 ff.
subject matter provides for its own exposition, generating its own content and
ordering. For this to occur, each new determination must be incorporated into
the self-constitution of the subject matter whose self-determination is under
way. Otherwise, the connection between terms would depend upon something
outside their development. Since what each new determination is a
determination of is only established at the end of the development, every
advance beyond the indeterminate beginning represents a closing in on the
whole that will end up containing every preceding determination as an element
in its own constitution. Although the resulting whole is not a given foundation,
antecedently underlying the development, it turns out to be the ground
supporting each category, providing the sole basis for determining of what they
are part.
This enables the ensuing movement to be analytic and synthetic at once. As
in logic’s self-thinking of thought, here each advance is synthetic by presenting
something not already contained in what precedes it, yet analytic insofar as it
provides nothing that is not contained within the whole that is in the process of
determining itself.
Similarly, the development no less proceeds by determinate negation. Each
new term does represent a negation of what precedes it because it has an
irreducible otherness. If it lacked that element and were merely contained in its
predecessor, the movement would not be self-determining but would instead be
determined by contents given prior to the ensuing development. Because,
however, each term ends up integrated within the whole of self-determined
determinacy, the otherness differentiating the terms from their predecessors
equally incorporates the former terms as constitutive elements of the
determination under way. Consequently, each term arises through a
determinate negation, negating the preceding term by comprising something
other to it yet incorporating this predecessor as an element of its own
determination.
In sum, then, the requirements of philosophy in general entail the same
methodological prescriptions that are required by logic. If logic is to achieve its
constitutive goals, it must achieve precisely what philosophy turns out to
demand. In fact, the self-thinking thought that logic should comprise is
identical to the presuppositionless self-determined discourse to which
philosophy must aspire. This is why Hegel has good reason to call the
discourse with which philosophy must begin a science of logic and to introduce
it with parallel discussions of the methodological problems of logic and of
philosophy in general. Their convergence gives us good reason to leave the
perplexity of method behind and address concretely how something can be
conceived without foundations.
Chapter 3
Determinacy Without Appeal

to the Given
The Self-Evidence of the Category of Something
What it is to be determinate, to have quality, to be something hardly appears to

be a problem worthy of thought. How could anything be more self-evident or
familiar or resistant to questioning? It seems virtually impossible to be
unacquainted with the category of something, whether in reality or in thought
or speech. To encounter anything real at all is to encounter something, whereas
to think or speak any intelligible content is already to refer to something
thought or spoken. Indeed, it is unimaginable how one could fail to understand
something, since if one did lack all notion of something, there would be
nothing determinate to understand or encounter.
Yet despite the ubiquitous self-evidence of categories of determinate being,
of quality, of something, philosophers have unremittingly asked, “What is
something?” and offered manifold discordant answers. To some extent, the
divergence of response has been due to the varied way in which the question
has been formulated. Some have posed the problem in a narrowly ontological
form, where what is at issue is how something can be in reality. Others have
treated the question in a narrowly epistemological manner, focusing their
concern upon what something is as an object of knowledge. Still others have
limited their inquiry to the semantic or psychological problems of how
something can be meant in speech or represented in thought. Each of these
formulations comprises a different question calling for a different answer, to
the extent that meaning, representation, knowledge and reality can be
distinguished. For just this reason, no such formulation inquires into what
something is per se, as a category. All these formulations instead consider the
category of something as further qualified by being meant, represented,
realized or known. Since these further qualifications involve an application of
the category of something, the controversies specific to their formulations can
hardly be addressed without accounting for the category itself. It is here, in this
account, which all ontological, epistemological, psychological, and semantic
considerations take for granted when they apply the category, that the
philosophical controversy surrounding something is rooted.
Admittedly, much if not most philosophical debate concerning what
something is has committed the category mistake of confusing ontological,
epistemological, psychological, or semantic explanations with the account of
something perse. This has occurred even though all such efforts automatically
neglect and presuppose the categorial exposition by addressing something from
the outset with added qualifications. Eliminating this confusion, however, does
not augur any easy resolution to the philosophical problem that something
presents. The moment something is itself called into question rather than
treated as an unproblematic given, analyzable straight away in its relation to
reality, knowing, or meaning, the possibility of a categorial account seems as
paradoxical as it is indispensable.
Since things, representations, meanings, reasons, and knowledge are all
something to the extent that they are determinate, a philosophical account of
something finds itself in the peculiar position of being unable to employ any of
these other terms as categorial elements of its exposition. If any were employed
not just as means of expression but as components of the category of
something, terms incorporating something would be used to determine it,
causing the whole enterprise to collapse in a vicious circularity. As soon as the
category of something is specified by means of elements that are already
something themselves, the question is begged.
This does not mean that an account of something must be precluded simply
because all inquiry involves living individuals inhabiting a historical world
using a given language to express their thoughts. None of these determinate
conditions need interfere so long as no claim is made that any one of them
enters in determining what is and what is not entailed in the category of
something. Provided they are treated not as transcendental principles juridically
determining what counts as knowledge but as conditions of all inquiry, which,
as such, permit right as well as wrong theories to be thought and expressed,
their contribution is a matter of indifference to the truth of what they allow to
be expressed.
The real problem concerns instead how the category of something can be
accounted for without being taken for granted. To explicate something without
begging the question, what it is must somehow be determined without
employing anything that is already determinate. In regard to qualitative
determinacy in general, this signifies that an account of quality must avoid
using any antecedently given qualitative terms in specifying its subject. Yet
how can something be explicated if its account cannot rely upon any
determinate givens?
Calling the category of something into question seems to present an
Determinacy Without Appeal to the Given 33
insoluble dilemma. To provide a noncircular answer would appear to require

accounting for determinacy with no other resource than indeterminacy. That,
however, seems prima facie impossible. After all, how can the category of
something be explicated in terms of nothing? Yet, if that cannot be done, all
inquiry will be left resting on a dogmatic foundation consisting in the
assumption of something, an assumption that is always present the moment a
determinate subject matter is considered, but that can never be fully warranted
if the very category of something defies analysis.
The Lure of the Irreducibility of Determinacy
If this impasse does not reinstate the self-evidence of something, it provides

ample incentive to evade questioning what it is to be determinate by
acknowledging the irreducibility of something. Instead of attempting to
construct something from nothing, why not take the opposite route, admit that
something underlies all account of what is determinate, and attempt to conceive
how every determinacy is founded on a determinate given?
Logically speaking, there are two ways of pursuing this endeavor. One is to
show how anything determinate is irreducibly explicable in terms of some
privileged given. Alternately, one can argue that something has its determinacy
in virtue of being determined by some privileged determiner.
These parallel strategies have frequently been pursued in narrowly
ontological and epistemological or semantic terms, respectively. The appeal to
an irreducible given has often taken the form of an identification of some real
substrate as the foundation of all other determinate content, whereas the appeal
to a privileged determiner has ever more commonly taken the form of a turn to
the structure of consciousness, language, or culture as the ultimate arbiter of all
definite meaning and knowledge. Nevertheless, both strategies involve an
approach that applies as much to something as such as to how something is
meant, thought, known, or realized. Only when these options are examined in
their full generality can the root of their problems be exposed and remedied.
Dilemmas of the Theory of Substance
The approach that acknowledges the irreducibility of something by conceiving

a given foundation for all determinacy has classically been pursued as a theory
of substance. Its argumentative strategy has consisted in showing that no
account can be made of any determinacy that is meant, known, or real without
appeal to a given substrate on which all determinate qualities and relations are
based and which all determinate things exemplify. Although the advocates of
the theory of substance have disputed whether there are one or many
substances, whether all or any of the qualities and relations rooted in substance
are necessary or contingent, and which can be objects of different sorts of
knowledge, their disputes have all rested on the acceptance of this common
argumentation on behalf of substance itself.
The Justifications o f Substance
Classically formulated by Aristotle, but recast and reenacted by countless

others, this argument has an undeniable force in all three of its aspects.
The justification of substance in regard to meaning comes first, for if
substance is a precondition for meaning anything determinate, all discourse
depends upon its semantic foundation. Naturally, the problem of determinacy is
crucial to speech, for if words lack specific meaning, they become meaningless,
annihilating all conversation whether in the inner dialogue of thought or in
discourse among individuals.1 Yet for meaning to be determinate, what is
meant must have definite attributes, and these must not all be accidental. They
cannot be only accidental, both because the accidental attributes of something
would be infinite and hence beyond enumeration,*2 and because there would be
no fixed point of reference to which the accidents could be predicated.3 For
there to be attributes, accidental or not, there must be something to which they
are attributed - the given subject of their predication. Although this subject
must have attributes to be something definite, it must still have its own
determinate character in order to be a subject of predication, distinct from its
attributes. Hence, meaning requires not only that what is meant have necessary
attributes but that what is meant involve an already determinate subject of
which these are predicates. For anything determinate to be meant there must be
given substance - a determinate substrate providing a subject of predication.
If this is the case for meaning, it must also hold true for knowledge.
Knowledge is empty unless it is determinate. For anything determinate to be
known, the minimal requirements of meaning must be met. If knowledge is
justified opinion and an opinion is meaningless unless it expresses something
determinate, there can be no determinate knowledge unless there is a given
subject of predication to provide determinacy for knowledge’s warranted
belief. Determinate knowledge therefore rests on substance to the extent that
meaning does.
1
Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book Gamma, ch. 4, 1006b9-10.
2
Ibid., Book Gamma, ch. 4, 1007al3-15.
3
Ibid., Book Gamma, ch. 4, 1007a33-35.
Further, if anything determinate is to be known, it cannot consist entirely in

accidental attributes. This would deprive all knowledge claims of any specific
relation to their object, as well as render what is known utterly meaningless.
Knowledge of anything determinate must thus be knowledge of something that
involves a given substrate with a necessary, determinate relation to some
specific qualities inhering in it. This will be true just as much of knowledge of
determinate concepts as of knowledge of determinate things. In each case,
substance seems to enter in as an irreducible factor of knowledge.
In regard to reality, the arguments for the irreducibility of substance are
fully analogous. For anything to have a determinate existence, must there not
be some underlying given substrate, bearing certain attributes rather than
others? Although attributes may already have determinate meaning by being
subjects of a predication defining their specific quality, they cannot exist by
themselves without contradicting their character as commonly attributable
qualities, as “third man” arguments can testify. The existence of something
determinate requires a real substrate in which quality can actually inhere, a
substrate that must already have its own character in distinction from its
qualities simply in order to be their bearer. Further, since something becomes
indistinguishable from everything else if all its qualities are accidental, the
given substance can underlie a determinate being only insofar as it has a
determinate relation to its attributes, where at least some are essentially its own.
In these respects, the reality of something determinate depends upon presence
of substance, comprising a given substrate, determined in some essential way
through its attributes but without being reducible to them.
The Fatal Enigma o f Substance
All of these arguments stand or fall upon the resolution of a problem vital to
the irreducibility of substance. The moment one grants that something meant,
known, or real has its determinacy in virtue of a given substrate in which all
quality inheres and to which all relation refers, the question naturally arises as
to how that given substrate can have its own determinate character
independently of all the meanings, knowledge, and things that owe their
determinacy to it. If everything is either substance or a quality or relation of
substance, substance itself would have to be intelligible without reference to
any particular substances or to any qualities or relations. Yet how can the given
substrate of all qualities and relations have any definite character of its own
without them?
An easy answer seems to be that substance has its own specific nature by
virtue of being a composite of distinct elements - form and matter, or some
such contrast of essentially inhering attributes and the substrate that becomes
further determined by bearing them. After all, although a given substrate of

determinacy might have no specific character without some quality, it cannot
just be quality. To be the determinate basis of quality and relation, substance
must add to qualities something else that allows them to inhere in a determinate
fashion and comprise an identifiable something. But if substance is to be
accounted for as the unity of such components, while maintaining its primacy
as the basis of all determinacy, how can these components be something
determinate in their own right prior to the formation of substance that arises
from their combination?
Attributes cannot have any meaning nor be known or realized without
referring to some given substance that is itself distinguished by qualities of its
own. Similarly, the substrate awaiting attribution is utterly indeterminate and
hence meaningless, unknowable, and nothing at all, unless it already has
determinacy as something given - that is, according to the theory of substance,
as a composite bearer of some quality. In either regard, the components of
substance cannot provide an account of its character without taking it for
granted or repudiating its constitutive role as the basis of each and every
determinate something.
If substance cannot be determined in virtue of given definite components
without falling into vicious circularity, substance will have to be determinate in
virtue of what it is itself. Yet, if substance is to be determined by itself, it must
lose its constitutive character as the irreducibly given something on which all
determinacy rests. For if it has any irreducibly given character, it has qualities
that it does not give itself, but simply bears from the outset.
The appeal to substance not only begs the question, but undermines itself
through the vitiating circularity of allowing what makes something determinate
to be already determinate.
The Dilemma of Rooting Determinacy in a Privileged Determ iner
The collapse of the theory of substance shows that the account of something
cannot lie in any given substrate - that is, in any prior something. In face of the
inscrutable difficulty of conjuring something from nothing, this lesson has led
more and more philosophers to refrain from claiming irreducible immediacy
for any given content and to consider the category of something and all other
determinations to be constituted in terms of epistemological or semantic
conditions. Instead of advancing some meant or known term as the basis of all
determinate being, these thinkers have taken the structures of knowing and
meaning as irreducible foundations underlying the specification of each and
every category, opinion, knowledge claim, and thing.
The argument on behalf of the irreducibility of such determining conditions

has the same ring whether the conditions be characterized as the opposition of
consciousness, the structure of language, the historical practices of culture, or a
given conceptual scheme. In each case, some undeniable feature of the reality
of discourse is picked out and given the privileged role of being the prior
condition of all other terms.
For thinkers such as Kant and Husserl, the opposition of consciousness is
unavoidably fundamental, due to the fact that all categories, meanings,
knowledge, and objects of knowledge can be considered by us only as they are
given in our conscious awareness. According to them, this signifies that all
determinacy is mediated and determined by the structure of consciousness.
Hence, as Kant suggests, the notion of an object of consciousness in general
precedes the concepts of something and nothing,4 just as the notion of a
representation is indefinable and ultimately unanalyzable insofar as all terms
that could be employed to account for it would already be representations
themselves. By the same token, Kant admits, the pure categories are equally
irreducible and indefinable, since definition is itself a judgment and hence
already contains these categories insofar as they are logical functions of
judgment.5
Similarly, thinkers such as Wittgenstein argue that insofar as all discourse
operates in terms of linguistic practice, every meaning, be it qualified as a
category, an opinion, a knowledge claim, or an object, is irreducibly constituted
by the structure of language that is operative in its expression. What it is to
mean, know, or be something can thus only be accounted for by pointing to the
way language allows these terms to be signified and communicated.
Alternately, those who follow Heidegger and Gadamer in emphasizing how
consciousness and language are imbedded in historical, practical engagements
argue that all discourse rests on these cultural practices, not just intentionality
or grammar. Hence, no matter what terms might be employed to account for the
category of something, each and every one will already be determined by the
practices underlying the formation of frames of reference.
In each case, all inquiry is irreducibly situated within some encompassing
conceptual scheme, which plays the same foundational role whether it be
rooted in the pure categories of the understanding, ideal or ordinary language,
or, most concretely, in the historical practices of a given culture.
Although the appeal of these arguments cannot be denied, they all rest upon
4 Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysical Elements o f Justice, John Ladd, trans.

(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), p. 18, n. 11.
5 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. by Paul Guyer and Allan
Wood (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), A245, p. 344.
a critical maneuver, basic to transcendental logic, whose justification is far

from self-evident. In each case, conditions of discourse are identified and then
elevated to determining structures that not only make possible the thought and
expression of subjects of inquiry but juridically constitute what they allow to be
presented. It may be true that any account of the category of something will be
undertaken by conscious individuals employing the language of a particular
culture in accord with a certain conceptual scheme, but this does not mean that
any of these enabling conditions can determine which account of something
has validity. Indeed, the very fact that all of these conditions are operative in
true as well as false discourse shows that it makes little sense to appeal to them
in resolving questions of knowledge.
Although each version of this approach confidently presumes that it offers
an encompassing account for every topic imaginable, what sets in relief their
common dilemma are the difficulties that arise when the category of
determinacy is itself at stake. If it is argued that what accounts for something
being determinate is its constitution by some irreducible epistemic or semantic
condition of discourse, the question naturally arises as to how that condition
can have its own determinate character. It must not be what it is by virtue of
other terms that it itself constitutes, since that would involve the circularity of
taking its own specific character for granted. Yet, if the condition has a definite
nature allowing it to be identified as intentionality, language games, some
conceptual scheme, or whatever, how can it have this identity without
involving given terms with their own qualities? If the epistemic or semantic
condition in question is still to maintain its privileged position as the
determining ground of all contents of discourse, how can these constitutive
terms have their own character without already being mediated by the
condition they determine?
If the privileged condition be identified, for instance, as the structure of
consciousness, its own determination will already involve a whole slew of
categories (subject, object, unity, relation, self-relation, and so on), whose own
meanings should derive from intentionality. The same difficulty applies to
every other case. If language games be given primacy, everything making
linguistic practice what it is must be at hand, just as, if conceptual schemes or
cultural contexts be made privileged conditions, what gives them their
characteristic identity must already be determinate. Yet none of these
constitutive factors can have any prior determinacy if the conditions they
characterize are to be irreducible foundations of all discourse.
To escape this question-begging, the privileged determiner of all content
must account for its own determinacy - that is, constitute itself as the
constitutive condition of all discourse without relying upon any independently
given terms. If all categories are to depend upon a conceptual scheme for their
character, that scheme must be the source of its own specifications. If that is the
case, the categorial scheme by which all terms are specified will determine the
categories that give it its own identity. Then the basis of determinacy will be
self-determined.
Although the appeal to the irreducibility of conceptual schemes requires
such a denouement, the conditions of discourse can no more be self-
determining than can be substance. To play its defining role as the irreducible
condition of discourse, an epistemic and/or semantic structure must have its
privileged givenness prior to every term it grounds. Otherwise, it loses its
irreducible primacy. To be self-determined, however, a conceptual scheme
could not have any given character, for if it did, it would already be something
prior to its act of constitution.
For this reason, the category of something cannot be accounted for by
appealing to any privileged conditions of discourse and the transcendental logic
they entail. The moment this strategy is adopted, the whole question is begged
simply because something, be it a determinate category or a determinate thing,
cannot owe its character as something to an independently given something.
That is, alas, what any determinate condition of discourse already represents.
Conceiving Something Without Privileged Givens or Conceptual Schemes
Despite its seeming self-evidence, the irreducibility of something cannot be

maintained, neither in terms of some privileged given underlying all quality
and relation nor in terms of some privileged determiner of contents of
discourse. This signifies that any philosophy that bases its argument upon
something determinate condemns itself to self-vitiating circularity and
dogmatism. It also means that philosophy must account for the category of
something if it is to free its argument from a dependence upon factors it cannot
make intelligible. Since every definite term or principle involves determinacy,
only when philosophy establishes what determinacy is can it possibly achieve a
thoroughgoing self-responsibility free of unexamined and inexplicable
assumptions. Yet how can the category of something be explicated?
Clearly, its exposition cannot rely upon any given terms that are already
determinate in their own right. Quality cannot be accounted for by appealing to
anything qualitative, nor can something be determined in reference to factors
that are independently something. Yet, if all question-begging is to be avoided,
are there any viable options left?
Only two routes seem available, routes that may ultimately be no more
distinct than feasible. One consists in determining determinacy by means of
indeterminacy. This approach would escape the problem of circularity by
appealing to the one and only resource that is not already determinate. But is
indeterminacy any resource at all, let alone one from which something
determinate can be categorized?
Another possibility consists in conceiving something in terms of contrastive
relations among factors such that neither the relations nor the factors involved
have any determinate character prior to the constitution of something in which
they figure. If such a conception is possible, it would also avoid question-
begging by accounting for something without employing any terms that have
an independently given character. Yet can there be any such development of a
contrast with no predetermination?
Perhaps the only thinker to have pursued either of these options is Hegel,
who does so in his Science o f Logic by combining both in one and the same
developmental argument. This argument, which inaugurates systematic logic
and philosophy without foundations, must now be drawn upon to show how
something can be conceived without any conceptual schemes - that is, without
appeal to independently determinate categories, which would lead into a
viciously circular impasse.
From Indeterminacy to Determinate Being
As we have seen, an exposition of the categories of determinacy cannot begin

with any conceptual resources that already have quality and determinate being.
Hence, if there is to be any categorial starting point from which something can
be determined, it will have to be the category of indeterminacy, from which all
quality, relation, and any other determinacy is excluded. It makes no difference
whether this category be being or nothing. If indeterminacy be being that has
no relation to anything else nor any distinctions within itself nor any undivided
quality, it is nothing, the utter absence of all determinacy.6
Indeterminacy provides no resource for categorizing anything other than
itself. It cannot be the reason or determiner of any additional category, for then
it would have the very determinate character of being a cause or principle.
Furthermore, it cannot be the means for determining anything whose own
character rests on a contrastive relation to something determinate. If
determinacy has definite character only in distinction from the quality of
another determinacy, nothing determinate can possibly follow from
indeterminacy. Quite literally nothing can proceed from indeterminacy, which
is to say that only another indistinguishable indeterminacy can follow upon the
indeterminacy with which we must begin. Whether we call the former “being”
6 Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik: Die Lehre vom Sein (1832), pp. 71-2; Hegel,
Science o f Logic, pp. 82-3.
and the latter “nothing” or the former “nothing” and the latter “being” makes
no difference since to be indeterminate, each lacks all distinguishing marks.
The key point is that once an account of determinacy begins as it must with
indeterminacy, it has nowhere to go but to another category as indeterminate as
the first.
This peculiar predicament immediately raises two questions. First, why
should there be any such development from one indeterminacy to another?
Second, how can such a move comprise any development at all?
The first question asks for reasons where there cannot be any. Any move
from indeterminacy to another category cannot have a cause, a ground, or any
explanatory principle at all. The moment any reason is offered either
indeterminacy gets treated as a determiner of some sort, which violates its
constitutive lack of all qualification, or some extraneous third term is
surreptitiously introduced. Indeterminacy can stand as a starting point of
further development only insofar as what follows, follows immediately,
without any ground or reason at all. To ask for any explanation is tantamount to
asking for indeterminacy to be replaced by a definite determinate principle,
which necessarily subverts any attempt at conceiving determinacy per se.
Even if no reason be sought for why indeterminacy be followed by another
indeterminacy, it is difficult to see how such a groundless succession involves
any development. If the only successor to the category of indeterminacy can be
an equally indeterminate category, which follows without any mediating
principle or connection, is there any basis for claiming that an advance has
been made? The moment the second category is offered, it ceases to be an
advance insofar as its own indeterminacy leaves it without any mark by which
it can be distinguished from the first category. If the first determinacy be called
“being” and the second “nothing”, then nothing is being, which seems to
signify that a move from being to nothing is no move at all, since it just
reiterates the point of departure. By the same token, the first indeterminacy,
being, is immediately what the second one is, nothing. Either way, the would-
be succession of categories vanishes by itself into the selfsame indeterminacy,
which neither becomes something else nor ever ceases to be at hand. If this is
so, no categorial development can possibly emerge from indeterminacy, and,
by extension, no account can be given of determinacy.7
Yet does the groundless succession of one indeterminacy by another offer
no more than an undivided exposition of the same category of indeterminacy,
empty and immobile? Admittedly, since the two categories are
7 Hegel discusses these objections in remarks 3 and 4 to chapter 1 of the

Wissenschaft der Logik: Die Lehre vom Sein (1832), pp. 85-99, Science of Logic, pp.
93-105.
indistinguishable and their succession involves no mediating terms, being and

nothing do not stand in any determinate relation by which an advance has been
made from one category to another. Nevertheless, the immediate collapse of the
differentiation of one indeterminacy from another, where being is nothing and
nothing is being, where the second term is no sooner advanced than it is
indistinguishable from the first, presents a movement that only operates insofar
as there are two indeterminacies, at once different and indistinguishable. What
contains them in their difference and identity is this movement itself, whose
sequence of being and nothing is just as much a ceasing to be, where being is
followed immediately by nothing, as a coming to be, where nothing is being.8
Although Hegel names this movement “becoming”, he admits that it does
not involve the coming to be of anything determinate nor the transformation of
some given something into something other.9 Since its constitutive terms are
equally indeterminate, there are no specific givens at hand to either cease to be
or become something else. What is at hand, however, is the movement of this
becoming itself, which, although its terms are merely being and nothing, is
distinguishable from both. Minimal as it may be, the differentiation of two
indeterminacies that immediately collapses, in which being has passed over
into nothing and nothing has passed over into being without any intermediate
term or reason, is a category distinct from the dual categories of indeterminacy
it contains. Nevertheless, it obtains its irreducibility without relying on any
other means than them.
Does this category of becoming then provide something determinate in
contrast to the indeterminacies of which it is composed, something determinate
whose development from the categories of being and nothing could offer an
account of determinacy that involves no determinate givens?
Hegel himself refrains from identifying the category of becoming with the
category of determinate being. He does suggest, however, that the category of
becoming provides all the resources necessary for conceiving what it is to be
determinate. According to his argument, becoming provides this service insofar
as its own ingredients, coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be - that is, the
successions of being and nothing and of nothing and being - collapse of
themselves, leaving a unity in which being and nothing are contained not
sequentially but in an abiding relation to one another. The movement of
becoming comes to a halt because the being that follows from nothing is
indistinguishable from the latter just as the nothing that follows from being is
9 Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik: Die Lehre vom Sein (1832), pp. 73—4, 78;
Hegel, Science o f Logic, pp. 83, 84, 87.
indistinguishable from it. Hence, not only are coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be
indistinguishable, but each immediately cancels itself as a sequence, leaving
being and nothing as the only abiding elements of the whole that becoming
comprises. Having lost its dual sequential movements, this whole now simply
consists in a unity of being and nothing that contains them as components
mediated by their identity. According to Hegel, this provides the minimal
specification of determinate being, by which something can begin to be
categorized.101
How this is so is far from transparent, even if one grants that becoming
involves more than a reiteration of indeterminacy and that the coming-to-be
and ceasing-to-be of becoming collapses, leaving behind no more than a unity
of being and nothing. For how could any resulting unity of being and nothing
constitute a threshold of determinate being? With both components utterly
indeterminate and no third term available, where are the resources for
specifying something rather than nothing?
Given what must be precluded, Hegel’s recourse to such a unity of being
and nothing has a certain inevitability. After all, what it is to be determinate
cannot already involve any factor with determinacy, without taking itself for
granted and begging the question. With everything determinate excluded, all
that is left are being and nothing, which are no sooner given than they pass
over into one another, eliminating the becoming in which they figure as
distinguishable yet identical terms. But how can determinate being be specified
from being and nothing?
Being, Nonbeing, and Being Determinate
Despite the paucity of the material, the option at hand has an immediate
plausibility. Since being determinate cannot be categorized through qualities,
definite relations, or definite entities without question-begging, what else can
suffice than a unity of being and nonbeing,11 where the contrast of the two
provides the minimal definiteness underlying all quality and relation? Without
referring to any other properties, determinacy is defined simply by what it is
and what it is not, just as the indeterminacy common to being and nothing is
overcome when being is joined with nonbeing so that each delimits the other.
11 “Nothing” and “nonbeing” do not designate different categories, for negation of
being is the same indeterminacy that nothing and being each comprise. Nonetheless,
“nonbeing” is useful in analyzing determinate being since it connotes how in the unity
of being and nothing, nothing is immediately different from being.
Admittedly, any constitution of determinacy from being and nonbeing is

difficult to imagine without referring to the presence or absence of definite
qualities, relations, and entities, which all have their definite character by
possessing certain features and not others. When determinacy itself is at stake,
however, the contrast of being and nonbeing is not a contrast between the
presence and absence of any independently given factors. Being determinate
without further qualification must instead involve no more than a coterminous
being and nonbeing, where being and nothing no longer figure as alternating
unrelated categories but as the sole coeval elements of what obtains definition
as sheer definiteness by being their unity.
Indeed, if all definite qualities, relations, and entities are what they are only
by being something and not being something else, this only testifies to how the
unity of being and nonbeing underlies all further determinacies as a prior
category they inevitably incorporate. If they all depend upon the presence and
absence of different features for their own character and these features
themselves similarly depend upon being and nonbeing for their respective
definition, an infinite regress will be escaped only if being and nonbeing
provide determinacy in general.
What does remain perplexing is how a unity of being and nonbeing can
provide for categorizing quality or something. How can the combination of
being and nonbeing supplant their indistinguishable indeterminacy with what it
is to be determinate? In what sense can nonbeing make being determinate when
nonbeing itself has no specific character independent of its contrastive unity
with being? How can nonbeing render being determinate when nonbeing is not
already the absence of something definite? Or, if being and nonbeing have no
determinate character apart from their contrast with one another, in what does
their own difference consist?
Quality, Otherness, and Relation
If the unity of being and nonbeing first comprises determinacy, the contrast
terms of being and nonbeing could only be determinate themselves if each
contains the same component structure. The nonbeing incorporated in
determinacy would then, however, no longer be nonbeing without further
qualification. Not only would it comprise a determinate being in its own right,
but it would involve more than just its own being and nonbeing. Since it would
also be distinct from that of which it is the nonbeing, it would additionally
stand in contrast to that determinate being, which, for its part, would contain
being and nonbeing while figuring in the same contrastive relation to its
correlatively determinate nonbeing.
This indicates not just why being and nonbeing cannot be determinate
themselves when they first unite to form determinate being. It also sheds light
on how determinate being provides a means for characterizing something
determinate whose own component contrast terms are determinate themselves.
What makes this utilization especially pertinent is that it is entailed in
determinate being itself. Seeing how this is so makes comprehensible in what
way being and nonbeing can render determinate their own unity.
Let it be granted that what it is to be determinate minimally consists in
being a unity of being and nonbeing. Being and nonbeing here can have no
further character than being the aspects of what determinate being is and is not,
since otherwise determinacy is taken for granted. Consequently, their unity has
a character distinct from each of them, the character of being determinate. It is
appropriate to call this category “quality”, as Hegel does,12since quality cannot
be explicated by means of any qualitative features. There is little alternative to
categorizing quality as what die unity of being and nonbeing is per se. Quality
is not a particular property differentiated from others in terms of certain
features. Nor can quality be something inhering in a given determinate
substrate. As the unity of being and nonbeing in contrast to each of these terms,
quality does not have a determinate basis. Rather, it itself is what being
determinate minimally comprises, relying not on determinate givens for its own
character but solely on the indeterminate contrast terms of being and nonbeing.
As a result, nothing more can be said about quality, except to refer to these
components or to its being as their unity.13
Nevertheless, because the unity of being and nonbeing is qualitative,
determinate, what it is, its being, is itself determinate, just as is what it is not,
its nonbeing. Although quality is a unity of being and nonbeing, wherein each
is without quality, quality itself has a being and nonbeing that are determinate
by being quality’s presence and absence, as opposed to being and nonbeing per
se. To avoid confusion, it is worth following Hegel, as well as prior
philosophical tradition, by giving distinct names to the being and nonbeing of
quality, identifying them as reality and negation, respectively.14
Calling the coordinate being and nonbeing of what is determinate “reality”
and “negation” might suggest a narrowly ontological interpretation of these
categories. As Hegel himself makes clear, however, in his remark on quality
and negation, reality is applicable as much to definite feelings, imaginings,
Science of Logic, p. 111.
thoughts, numbers and falsehoods as to determinate things.15 What “reality”

here designates is not “real” being in contrast to fiction, the nonempirical, or
whatever, but simply the affirmative being of quality in contrast to the
coordinate nonbeing that joins in rendering it determinate. What it is for quality
in general to be is reality, whereas what quality in general is not is negation.
As determinate, quality is both reality and negation in that qualitative
determinacy both is and is not in determinate fashion. By the same token,
negation is as much a determinate being as is reality.16 Whereas reality is
quality insofar as it is, negation is the nonbeing of quality. Hence, negation is
not just nonbeing without further qualification, but nonbeing in relation to
qualitative determinacy, or what can be categorized as otherness.17 Since
negation is determinate in virtue of not being determinate being, the otherness
it comprises is not something extrinsic to quality. Rather, quality is otherness
itself, for the reality and negation of quality are inextricable aspects in its
specification.
This leaves a dual relation. On the one hand, otherness, in contrast to which
quality has its own reality, is immediately distinct from quality as its negation.
Their distinction is immediate in that there is no additional third term in which
their difference resides. Otherness is simply what quality is not. On the other
hand, otherness is equivalent to quality, for even though it comprises the non-
being of determinacy, it is a determinate being in its own right, with its own
reality and negation. Hence, otherness has the same structure as quality and yet
has quality as its otherness.
Something and Other
This contrast of quality and otherness, where each is immediately different yet
identical, provides the conceptual resources for categorizing something. With
quality constitutively standing in relation to otherness and otherness
constitutively opposing quality as its negation while being just what quality is,
it becomes possible and necessary to speak of a qualitative being distinct from
another qualitative being. Thus, whereas the unity of being and nonbeing
provides for quality in general, the identity and difference of quality and
otherness establishes the framework for conceiving something. It does so by
17 G.W.F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik: I. Band, /. Buck; Erstausgabe von
1812 (Gottingen: Vandenhock and Ruprecht, 1966), p. 49.
yielding a determinate being that is distinguishable through its contrast to

another determinate being, whose own integral character rests on its
involvement in the same contrastive relation. In this way, no independently
given qualitative entity enters in to make something what it is. That could not
possibly be the case, since it would take for granted precisely what must be
categorized.
Since each of the contrasted terms has no character beyond being a
determinate being distinct from another, these terms present something without
further qualification. Accordingly, they comprise components of anything
bearing additional qualities or relations.
What allows this categorization of something to avoid the pitfall of
circularly relying upon prior specific qualities or given determinate beings, be
they substrates or privileged determiners, is simply that all it involves are
quality and otherness per se in their relation to one another. Something without
further qualification is a qualitative being whose otherness is another
qualitative being standing in the same relation. Because the determinate reality
of something depends on its contrast to its determinate negation, something
constitutively has an other.18 Something is what it is, bearing its own quality,
by being in relation to another qualitative being. This is all that is available to
define something, since no further specific features, principles, or connections
can be introduced without taking the category of something for granted.
For this reason, the other, in contrast to which something has its determinate
being, cannot be distinguished through any possession of certain characteristics
that the latter lacks. It can only have its own contrasting character as something
different simply by being in relation to the former as its other - that is, as what
the former is not without further qualification. This means that the other of
something has the latter as its other. Hence, what is other is something in just
the same way as is the something it opposes.19 Each maintains its own distinct
character by standing in relation to the other as the latter’s other, even though,
in so doing, each is both something and other in precisely the same fashion. As
a result, just as quality and otherness are at one and the same time identical and
different, so something is and is not identical to what is its other.
These concomitant relations of something and other cast in doubt Kant’s
argument that the most abstract concept is that which has nothing in common
with what is different from it and that this is the concept of something, from
18 Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik: Die Lehre vom Sein (1832), p. Ill; Hegel,
which only nothing is distinct.20 What the preceding argument suggests is that,
contrary to Kant, the category of something already involves the categorial
succession of being, nothing, becoming, quality, and otherness, whereas being
and nothing involve no prior terms. If this is the case, then what is most
abstract are being and nothing, which are each identical to what is minimally
differentiated from them - namely, being versus nothing and nothing versus
being. As for something, it is distinct not just from nothing but from other as
well.
Nevertheless, the identity accompanying the difference between something
and other appears to destroy the determinate being of something very much as
the indistinguishability of being and nothing seemed to call into question any
development of categories from indeterminacy. If something and other are
identical, does this not eliminate all distinction between them and with it, the
contrast by which one qualitative determinacy as distinct from another can first
be categorized? Does it not collapse the distinction of something and other into
an empty reiteration of quality per sel The identity of something and other
would entail these results if it were the sole relation at stake. This identity,
however, itself involves the immediate difference of something and other. Only
insofar as what is other has something as its immediately different nonbeing is
something also an other and what is other also a something. Hence, the
equivalence of something and other does not eliminate the contrast by which
each has its own character. Rather, their own respective identities consist in
their identity and difference.
In this respect, something has a dual character consisting, on the one hand,
in its relation to other, wherein both are immediately different and identical,
and, on the other hand, in what something is apart in relation to itself. These
two aspects, which Hegel calls being-for-other and being-in-itself,21 are
intertwined with one another. Something is in relation to other only insofar as it
has being-in-itself, a character of its own allowing it to be something different
from its other and so stand in relation to it. By the same token, what something
is in itself is not independent of its relation to other insofar as the only resource
available to give something its own character is its contrast to something
other.22
Although this leaves something with a most minimal characterization,
20 Immanuel Kant, Logik, in Werke VI (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968),

A147, pp. 525-26.
nothing could be more fitting given the poverty of material with which its
categorization must proceed. Indeed, if there is any test forjudging this account
of something, it can only lie in certifying its utter abstraction. To the extent the
account passes muster, it provides a platform for further concretizations free of
reliance upon inexplicable substrates and determining conditions. In that case,
the categorization of something in its relation to other can testify to how
something determinate can be accounted for, as it must be, without appeal to
any conceptual scheme with its irreducibly determinate givens. What must not
be forgotten is that no matter how much the account of something may employ
a language rich in conceptual terms to achieve expression, what counts in
regard to logical development are which terms enter in as component elements
of the category at issue. It is in this respect and this respect alone that the
account of something warrants critical examination.
The Logic of Determinacy and the Logic of the Concept
The categorization of something signals an achievement that only systematic

logic can possibly attain: accounting for determinacy without taking any
determinacy for granted. This achievement provides the basic positive
fulfillment of the overcoming of the opposition of consciousness and the appeal
to the given constitutive of every variety of foundationalism. The development
of something from being has been shown to be the immediate result of making
the absolute beginning required by logic’s unity of method and subject matter.
Nonetheless, how determinacy and conceptual determination are connected is
still not established. To understand why the presuppositionless development of
systematic logic has anything to do with the universality of conceptualization, it
is necessary to consider how the determination of the concept itself becomes a
logical theme. The third part of Hegel’s Science o f Logic, the so-called
Subjective Logic, tackles this problem, and it is to this problem we must turn,
taking advantage of Hegel’s pioneering effort, where possible.
Chapter 4
Concept, Individuality, and

Self-Determination
The Concept in Philosophy
Philosophers may disagree with unmatched zeal, but no philosophical

controversy can free them from their common dependence upon the concept as
a privileged vehicle of truth. Even when embracing the most radical
empiricism or the most unyielding skepticism, philosophers cannot help but
make conceptual arguments. All their efforts may aim at curing themselves of
addiction to the concept, but so long as they reason in behalf of experience or
the suspension of judgment, thinking remains the element in which their claims
live and die.
Philosophers’ perennial use of conceptual argument might seem a double
curse, subverting all of philosophy’s equally perennial aspirations to seize the
truth. To begin with, if philosophical investigation constitutively employs
concepts, how can it possibly establish the validity of conceptual
determination? If philosophy cannot fail to use concepts to legitimate reason as
a midwife of truth, will philosophical investigation not fall into the vicious
circularity of relying upon an instrument that can never be certified without
taking its reliability for granted? Secondly, if philosophy must always utilize
concepts to arrive at truth, must philosophers not presuppose that the object of
truth is what is conceptually determinate? Besides being beyond philosophical
justification, will this assumption not limit objectivity to a mortuary of
changeless universals from which all becoming, all particulars, and indeed, all
actual existence are excluded as some inconceivable illusions? Will the only
objectivity that philosophy can conceive be a phantom realm of ideas that can
never correspond to genuine reality?1
These parallel problems would be fatal to philosophy if the concept were
what all too many philosophers have taken it to be: an abstraction whose*
Nietzsche raises both of these objections to philosophy in his Twilight of The

Idols.
universality is given independently of the particulars to which it pertains. This

view has crippling ramifications: First, it renders thinking a formal enterprise
that must look elsewhere for the content to which it applies. If the concept is a
universal that leaves undetermined the distinguishing features of the many it
otherwise unites, everything pertaining to individuation lies beyond the grasp
of thought. The problem of the differentia becomes an insurmountable obstacle
to the attainment of philosophical truth, for if the concept is a formal universal
that cannot lay hold of what individuates its particulars, conceptual
determination can never correspond to its objects. The concept may find itself
in some property that individuals share, but the individual will always fall
outside conceptual grasp. This predicament leaves two equally unsatisfactory
options: that parody of Plato, mocked by his own Parmenides, where
universals are held to be a separate realm of their own against which all
individuals are but illusory appearance, or the opposite extreme of nominalism,
where individuals devoid of universality are taken to be real and universals
devoid of individuality are regarded as subjective illusions.
Either move entails a further consequence of the rigid divide between
universal and particular: the freezing of concepts into immobile, isolated
abstractions that neither give themselves new determinations nor connect
themselves with one another or any other objects. So long as the concept is
taken to be a universal that has no inherent relation to its individuation, it does
not become something other than the abstraction it immediately comprises.
Instead, it relates only to itself and any relation to something else must be
externally imposed. Consequently any thinking that connects such concepts to
one another or to individuals will have no basis in the concepts themselves.
And if all concepts are of this ilk, any such connections will automatically be
bereft of conceptual, which is to say, philosophical justification.
Under these received dogmas the content of concepts becomes just as
problematic as their interconnection and objectivity. If concepts neither alter
themselves nor relate themselves to what is different from them, their own
content has an inescapable givenness. Frozen thus in solitary immediacy,
concepts can only be encountered in a series of atomistic receptions, devoid of
any intrinsic order or standard of completeness. To the degree that each
concept has an isolated givenness, no other conceptual term can possibly
certify that a putative concept has a valid content. Every candidate for
recollected idea, for example, has no more and no less authority than any other
abstraction that is immediately offered. Instead of providing truth, concepts get
reduced to vessels of meaning and thinking gets condemned to the doxography
of analysis.
If philosophy is to go beyond blindly collecting given meanings and instead
attain new knowledge through concepts, conceptual determination cannot be
Concept, Individuality, and Self-Determination 53
limited to abstract universals. This requirement has often been recognized.

Plato, for example, identified philosophical thinking with a dialectic in which
thought moves from one idea to another without leaving the domain of
concepts.2 Nevertheless, Plato never succeeded in providing an account of
concepts that avoided appeal to immediately given contents,3 nor avoided
reducing concepts to forms whose embodiments were incidental to the
universal in which they participated. Hence, it can be no surprise that Plato
could not provide the self-contained conceptual odyssey promised under the
banner of dialectic. Kant, for his part, acknowledged the need for overcoming
formal universality both by identifying philosophical wisdom with synthetic a
priori knowledge and by making necessary conceptual determination a
requirement for the objectivity of representations. As Kant recognized,
philosophy could obtain new knowledge of what was necessarily and
universally the case only insofar as concepts could be set in binding relation to
what was not their immediate identity. Yet, by conceiving such relations as a
synthesis, Kant treated the related terms as separate, immobile categories
whose necessary relation had to depend upon some third connecting factor - in
this case, sensible intuitions as independently given in experience.4 Far from
determining anything individual, concepts remained empty without the external
addition of intuitions. Similarly, although Kant allowed the necessary
conceptual relation of representations to overcome subjective association and
provide for reference to objects, he still left the resulting objectivity relative to
appearances. Hence, instead of enabling concepts to lay hold independently of
something other, Kant left Concepts incapable of determining things in
themselves, depriving synthetic a priori knowledge of any unconditioned
truth.5
The Concept in Systematic Logic
Not until Hegel, and perhaps not since Hegel, has any concerted effort been
2 Plato sketches dialectic in his famous account of the Divided Line in the
Republic, Book VI, 511c.
3 In particular, Plato roots all ideas in the Good, whose given content is
immediately intuited, but never shows how specific ideas arise from this foundation,
whose own determinacy remains problematic.
4 Hegel makes this point in the Science o f Logic. See Hegel, Wissenschaft der
Logik: Die Lehre vom Begriff (1816), p. 22; Hegel, Science o f Logic, p. 591.
5 Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik: Die Lehre vom Begriff (1816), p. 19; Hegel,
made to conceive how universality is intrinsically connected to individuality,

thereby enabling the concept to surmount the limitations that would condemn
philosophy to futility. Despite the growing mountain of discussion of Hegel’s
work, his contribution on this score has largely been ignored. This is partly due
to a lack of appreciation of the systematic program of the Logic and partly due
to a failure to get beyond the Logics of Being and of Essence and attend to the
crowning arguments of the Logic of the Concept.
The connection between these two areas of neglect is far from clear. As we
have seen, the systematic program of Logic addresses at one and the same time
the challenge of fulfilling the intrinsic demands of logical investigation and the
challenge of beginning philosophy without subverting the philosophical
enterprise. The answers to these two challenges are one and the same, yet how
the resulting solution involves something culminating in a logic of the concept
poses questions that have rarely been raised or resolved.
A rehearsal of the basic considerations underlying systematic logic brings
these questions to the fore. Although logic has continued to be taught and
studied as a formal discipline, aiming to uncover forms of thought that underlie
the thinking of any content, logic is a thinking of thinking, where form and
content, subject and object, method and topic are one and the same. If
consciousness be a knowing that constitutively relates to an object it takes to be
given independently of its relation to it, then logic can properly proceed only if
the defining opposition of consciousness is overcome, that is, if knowing and
what is known become indistinguishable. Logic cannot succeed unless its
cognition achieves identity with its object because logic will not establish what
valid thinking is unless its thinking of valid thinking is itself valid thinking.
Accordingly, logic provides the very form of truth, for logical thinking must
correspond to its subject matter and do so with a thoroughness that is
impossible if knowing relates to something independent of cognition. A
discipline that addresses a subject matter distinct from its own thinking cannot
help but presuppose its method. Since such a discipline investigates what its
topic is, which is something different from the procedure by which it is
uncovered, the method is not established by the investigation but must be
employed by it as something independently furnished. Moreover, in order to
have a specific topic to address with its given method, such a science must
presuppose some minimal identity for its subject matter. Otherwise, it has
nothing determinate to consider. By contrast, logic can presuppose neither
method nor subject matter. Because what logic thinks is indistinguishable from
its thinking of it, if logic were to begin with any preconception of its method or
topic the identity of valid thinking would be taken for granted instead of being
established as the outcome of logical investigation. To avoid begging the
question, logic must therefore begin without any determinate method or
content. Yet, if logic must proceed without any given method or any given
content, whatever content it succeeds in developing will have to be as free of
external determination as the form it takes. In positive terms, this signifies that
the content must order itself, just as its ordering must be self-determined.
Unlike formal universals, whose rigidity requires an external hand to relate
them to any further contents, the determinacies of logic must transform
themselves and thereby establish the succession of terms that end up
comprising the autonomous development of logical thought. Since this free
development of self-determined content begins without any presupposed
method or subject matter, the self-thinking thought of logic cannot help but be
a development of self-determination per se, that is, a development of self-
determined determinacy. The indeterminacy of the starting point and the self-
determination of the ensuing development are inseparable, for if logic began
with any determinate beginning, it would have a determinacy it had not
determined for itself. Far from predetermining the course of logical thought,
the very project of logic sets logic free of any foundations.
As we have seen in Chapter 2, all these implications, which Hegel
anticipates in the Introduction to the Science o f Logic, follow equally from the
consideration of with what philosophy must begin. If philosophy were to start
with any determinate method it would dogmatically presuppose the form of
philosophical investigation instead of considering this as a problem that must
be resolved within philosophy itself. By the same token, if philosophy were to
begin with any predetermined content, it would take its subject matter for
granted, relegating all its subsequent conclusions to claims resting upon an
arbitrarily assumed foundation. To begin non-dogmatically, philosophy must
therefore start with a complete absence of determinacy, with indeterminacy or
being, which can only be thought without mediating qualifications by an
equally indeterminate, immediate thinking. If anything is to arise from such
indeterminacy, it will have to emerge determined by nothing but itself, for
nothing is already at hand to give it a content or an order of presentation. Yet
since no foundation can be present as the given substrate of self-determination,
what follows from indeterminacy must once more be nothing but self-
determination without qualification. Accordingly, philosophy will escape the
hold of foundations only by beginning with indeterminacy and proceeding with
a self-development of self-determination.
It is not hard to see how the bare outline of Hegel’s Logic could fulfill the
program these considerations anticipate. The tripartite division into successive
logics of being, of essence and of the concept can readily be seen to comprise
the self-constitution of self-determination. The Logic of Being presents the
development of determinacy from indeterminacy. It offers an account of
determinacy without further qualification. O f course, if that account began
from some given determinacy instead of from an indeterminate starting point, it

would beg the question by presupposing determinacy, which is precisely what
is to be established. By contrast, the Logic of Essence can and must begin with
determinacy, namely the determinacy provided without any presuppositions by
the Logic of Being. Without that resource of determinacy in general, the Logic
of Essence can hardly unfold the determination of determined determinacy,
where determinacy is mediated by some factor that relates to it with a prior
immediacy. Only if determinacy is available, can determinacy figure as the
determiner of something else whose being it posits. This comprises a two-tiered
logic of essence and appearance, ground and grounded, cause and effect and all
the further relations involving what rests upon some foundation. Essence’s
foundational determination sets the stage for the Logic of the Concept to the
degree that the latter is a logic of freedom. Freedom’s self-determined
determinacy presupposes both determinacy in general and determined
determinacy since self-determination has determinacy and determines its own
determinacy. While incorporating what the Logic of Being and the Logic of
Essence provide, the Logic of the Concept transforms both by achieving an
identity between what is determined and what does the determining. In this
fashion self-determined determinacy emerges as the result of categories that
thereby get revealed as way stations incorporated into the process by which
self-determination constitutes itself.
This itinerary seems to stand in stark contrast to another division of logic in
which the concept looms large. Although Hegel may describe the contents of
the three subdivisions of logic in terms that fit the schema of determinacy,
determined determinacy, and self-determined determinacy, he also divides
logic into an Objective Logic and a Subjective Logic, describing the former as
a stage in which the concept is given in its immediacy, prior to coming into its
own as a self-mediated totality. Although Hegel qualifies this two-fold division
by inserting the Logic of Essence as a connecting bridge, the contrast of
Subjective and Objective Logics raises the question of why the concept should
map onto the logic of self-determination.
Hegel tells us that he has chosen the term concept with care because the
logical determinacies that come under its heading fit the usage that the
“concept” has come to have as a privileged vehicle of philosophical cognition.6
Significantly, when Hegel first introduces the concept as a theme, he initially
6 See Hegel, G.W.F., Werke 8: Enzyklopadie der philosophischen

Wissenschaften in Grundrisse (1830) - erster Teil: Die Wissenschaft der Logik
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), Zusatz to U160, p. 308; Hegel, G.W.F., Logic,
trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), addition to ill60,
p. 224.
defines it in terms of two parallel considerations: first, freedom, and then the
interconnection of universality, particularity, and individuality. The link
between these correlative characterizations must be comprehended if the role of
the concept in logic is to be unveiled.
Freedom, Individuality, and the Requirements of Conceptual Truth
Hegel introduces freedom as the truth of necessity, describing how the

governing relationship of the Logic of Essence resolves itself into self-
determination.7 The basic moves are starkly simple, yet seldom heeded,
especially by those who extol the hegemony of efficient causality. The
necessitation of determination by some external dominating factor is the
pervasive motif of the two-tiered relations in the sphere of essence. With
essence, being is always mediated by some foundation. Yet since the
foundation has its own determining character only by determining what it
founds, what is grounded effectively grounds its own foundation, resulting in a
reciprocal interaction where cause and effect simultaneously exchange their
roles. Since the erstwhile foundation turns out to have the same
determining/determined identity as its erstwhile derivative, the external
necessity of foundational determination is supplanted by an internal
determination, where the indiscemibility of determiner and determined factor
transforms their relation into one of self-determination. Although
differentiation still occurs, it proceeds within the unity of the self. Since
differentiation is now a matter of the self giving itself new determinacy,
differentiation takes the form of a development of the self and determination
becomes self-development.8
That the emergent process of self-determination could have anything to do
with universality, particularity, and individuality depends upon the conceptual
breakthrough that Hegel pioneers in conceiving the relation of these three
categories. All the dilemmas plaguing formal universality and the philosophies
that rely upon it are supplanted by a simple insight: the universal cannot
possess its encompassing unity as a one over many unless the plurality of its
particulars can be sustained. Particularity, however, only determines something
7 See Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik: Die Lehre vom Begriff (1816), pp. 1 2 ,14-
15; Hegel, Science o f Logic, pp. 583, 584-5.
8 This is why, as Hegel duly observes, the categories of the concept develop,
whereas those of essence are posited. See Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik: Die Lehre
vom Wesen (1813), pp. 4-5, Hegel, Wissenshaft der Logik: Die Lehre vom Begriff
(1816), pp. 28-30; Hegel, Science o f Logic, pp. 390-391, 596-7.
as an undifferentiated embodiment of the universal. Qua instance, particulars

stand in identical relation to the universal in which they participate. Identifying
a factor as an embodiment of a universal in no way distinguishes it from any
other embodiment. Yet, unless instances can be distinguished from one
another, their plurality collapses into one and the universal loses its own
constitutive character as a one over many. Consequently, the encompassing
unity of the universal depends upon the differentiation of particulars, which is
what individuality provides for each. Individuality, as the differentiated
particular, is therefore ingredient in universality. And, conversely, because the
individual is the differentiated particular, it is equally tied up with universality,
without which it loses the particularity that allows it to be more than a classless
something or appearance.
The Logic of Self-Determination as the Logic of the Concept
These interconnections between universality, particularity, and individuality

provide the necessary categorial resources for determining self-determination.
Because self-determination must give itself new determinacy to be what it is,
freedom minimally involves a successive plurality of determinacies. Since,
however, these differentiations remain elements of the self that determines
itself in and through them, their plurality comprises a development of the self
by which it achieves its self-determined identity. Accordingly, these
differentiations are each instances of the self that thereby is their one in many,
comprising the universal subject that constitutes itself in these its own
particulars. Since the self can only determine itself by giving itself a plurality of
differentiations, the particular developments of the self must further be
individuated. Otherwise their plurality will collapse, eliminating the differences
that the self requires if it is to give itself new determinacy. Without the
categories of universality, particularity, and individuality, determinacy can only
be characterized through either contrast with a coeval other or derivation from
some antecedent foundation. With a one in many that remains self-identical in
the differentiation of individuated instances, the limits of being and essence are
overcome and subjectivity, self-development, or freedom becomes
determinable.
Granted the traditional association of the concept with universality and with
knowledge of what is universal, it now becomes plausible for the logic of the
concept to be properly the logic of self-determined determinacy. Because
universality is indeterminable without particularity and individuality, and
because universality, particularity, and individuality are the elementary
constituents of freedom, the concept and, by way of anticipation, conceptual
knowledge are as autonomous as they are universal. Moreover, because

universality is inseparable from individuality, the concept need not be
skewered upon the problem of the differentia, where formal universality
remains incongruent with what it determines. To be trapped within a logic of
essence, where determiner and determined never achieve the reciprocity with
which self-determination proceeds, may be the fate of the formal thinking of
the understanding, whose fixed and rigid representations need external help to
connect them with further content. By contrast, if we are to take seriously the
concept’s baptism in the logic of self-determination, the concept can develop
itself, establishing new connections unconditioned by any other factor, laying
claim to the title of the synthetic a priori itself.
The Concept, Objectivity, and the Logic of Truth
Establishing how the concept is self-determining and self-individuating may set

the stage for overcoming the problem of the differentia, but doing so only
partially secures the truth of conceptual determination. It enables the concept to
acquire a content that is not arbitrary and externally dependent, but it still does
not establish how the concept can provide a true determination of something
other than itself. So long as the content that the concept gives itself remains
purely conceptual in form, it remains subjective in the sense of remaining part
of a self whose self-determination does not stand in relation to something else.
In order for the concept to have objectivity, three things must be secured.
First, objectivity must itself be established both in distinction from and
independence of the concept. This presupposes the development of the concept
in its own subjectivity, since objectivity must be other to it. Secondly,
objectivity must have a character that is still conceptually determinable.
Otherwise, objectivity will remain something forever beyond conceptual grasp.
Finally, the congruity between objectivity and the concept must be certified
without appeal to some third factor, be it a criterion or a standpoint. If a
criterion were employed to assure correspondence, the old sceptical trope of
third man argumentation would reintroduce itself, incurring an infinite regress
where every application of the privileged criterion requires another criterion to
assure its correctness. If a standpoint were required to judge the fit of concept
and objectivity an analogous difficulty would be encountered. The above
dilemma would, of course, reoccur if the standpoint laid claim to authority by
appeal to any criterion. But if the standpoint avoided such an appeal, how
could it retain authority against any competing perspective? Since the
distinguishing identity of each standpoint would be different from both concept
and objectivity in order to comprise a distinct vantage point, nothing in concept
or objectivity could unequivocally sanction one standpoint’s primacy over

another. To avoid this problem, the agreement of concept and objectivity would
have to be established from these factors themselves, although the resulting
accord would comprise a further irreducible determinacy incorporating them in
their correspondence.
These are precisely the central challenges that Hegel’s Logic addresses in
moving from the account of the concept to that of objectivity and that of the
Idea. These problems are properly handled as logical issues, without appeal to
the epistemological frameworks of consciousness or language and the
opposition of real selves to the world. If the account of either concept or
objectivity were encumbered with any such aspects of nature and mind, the
whole enterprise would be sabotaged by the introduction of non-logical
determinations whose own difference and conceivability would have to be
taken for granted. To escape arbitrariness, the determination of objectivity and
its relation to the concept must incorporate nothing but the categories that arise
in the self-determination of thought without yet involving objectivity itself.
Objectivity is and cannot be reducible to reality or existence. As we have
seen in Chapter 3, reality, as contrasted to negation, is simply the being of
determinate being in general. Reality cannot help but be contained in the
concept insofar as the concept has determinacy. Admittedly, the concept has
determinacy in a manner rather different from how determinacy is contained in
the Logic of Being. Whereas the given determinacies of the Logic of Being
have determinate being by standing in contrast to other coeval entities, the
concept has determinacy that it has imposed upon itself, the determinacy of its
self-determination. Unlike given determinacy or determined determinacy, the
determinacy of the concept is what it has determined itself to be.
Consequently, what is to stand as something other to the subjectivity of the
concept must have more than reality. Of course, objectivity will possess reality
simply by standing in contrast to subjectivity as something other. But the basis
of that contrast must lie in something that is not simply contained within
subjectivity; if not, the would-be contrast term gets absorbed without remain.
For just this reason, objectivity cannot simply be existence. Existence has
reality, as something determinate, but existence adds the element of determined
determinacy common to everything in the logic of essence, where being has
lost its immediacy and become founded by some foundation. Existence is
determinacy that has a ground and exhibits the relativity of all factors that are
determined by something prior to them. The concept incorporates existence to
the degree that self-determined determinacy contains determinacy that is
determined. Conceptual determination, of course, adds the proviso, issuing
from reciprocal interaction, that what gets determined and what does the
determining are one and the same. This proviso issues from the reciprocal
interaction with which the logic of essence brings itself to an end and
introduces conceptual determination. As we have seen, although the two-tiered
relations of essence always distinguish between what is founded and what
founds, each factor only possesses its defining role thanks to the polar role of
its counterpart. Because what founds has its founding character determined by
what it founds, a reciprocal determination results where each term is both cause
and effect of the other. Since they are indistinguishable, leaving what
determines and is determined one and the same, reciprocal interaction itself
reverts into self-determination, leaving behind the two-tiered structure of
foundational determining and introducing the free self-development
constitutive of subjectivity. Although the resulting self-determined determinacy
of the concept is irreducible to the determinacy of being and the determined
determinacy of essence, the concept incorporates both. What is other to the
subjectivity of the concept must therefore be irreducible to each and every
category of being and essence.
Instead of being contained within the self of the concept’s self-
determination, objectivity must be radically independent. Since objectivity can
owe its determinacy neither to standing in contrast to other coeval factors nor
by issuing from any ground, it must be a self-sufficient totality minimally
external to the self-determination of the concept.
Knowledge of objectivity would accordingly escape the limitations of
“knowledge” of reality or “knowledge” of existence. Because reality is the
determinacy something has in virtue of its contrast to something else,
knowledge of reality is always dependent upon knowledge of this other. Yet, if
the other only has reality, knowledge of it is dependent upon the same
reference to other, introducing the endless dissemination of meaning that
Derrideans absolutize as if reality were the ultimate object of knowing.
Knowledge of existence, by comparison, is plagued by the problem of
knowing something that is always just the appearance of some determining
factor. The latter foundation cannot completely disclose itself in what it
determines at pain of collapsing the distinction between ground and grounded
by which it is defined. Moreover, if knowing is always only knowledge of what
is grounded, no ground can be known as such, since, by definition, the
foundation must lack the underlying sufficient reason on which cognition of
existence always depends. But then what cognition needs in order to know
existence always eludes capture.
To the degree that objectivity is a totality determined in and through itself,
objective knowledge cannot reside in contrastive reflections upon what is non-
objective nor in attempts to uncover foundations for objectivity. Instead,
objectivity can only be known in terms of its own self-constitution, which will
give what it is necessarily and with no unencompassed remain. Objectivity is
therefore the very entity that could be known without qualification and, in
particular, without the quandaries afflicting cognition of reality or existence.
Such a possibility beckons provided knowing can capture objectivity’s
process of self-constitution. What kind of knowing can lay hold of the internal
self-development of objectivity, that is, can grasp what Hegel routinely calls
the Sache selbstl Neither contrastive or foundational tropes will do. Only a
knowing that exhibits the self-determination of the concept can possibly hope
to correspond to objectivity’s own self-constitution. Precisely because the
content of conceptual determination develops itself, genuinely conceptual
thought alone can seize objectivity without the distortions of rendering it
something relative or foundationally determined by cognition.
Several problems still remain. Objectivity’s special suitability for
conceptualization might seem to shut philosophy off once more from any grasp
of reality or existence. Yet the inability to adequately conceive either reality or
existence independently need not signify that knowledge of objectivity leaves
reality and existence beyond philosophical treatment. To the degree that reality
and existence are and revert through their own determinacies into components
of objectivity, conceptual determination of objectivity will still consider reality
and existence. It will do so, however, in light of how neither reality nor
existence can subsist by themselves, nor be known with the same necessity and
completeness by which objectivity can be unveiled.
More vexing, however, is the abiding question of just how the concept can
achieve correspondence with objectivity. Even if objectivity is determined in
and through itselfjust as the concept is self-determined, objectivity is still other
to the concept. If the concept is to be a vehicle for subjectively appropriating
objectivity, conceptual determination must have room for both the concept and
its other, just as objectivity must retain its difference from the concept and yet
be transparent to conceptual determination. Moreover, the accordance of
concept and objectivity cannot just fall within our observation; if it is to be
inherent in concept and objectivity themselves, their determinacies must
generate the conceptual structure that contains their correspondence.
Hegel’s account of the Idea aims to provide just that logic of truth in which
concept and objectivity achieve correspondence without appeal to any third
factor, be it an immediate reference to reality, as in pre-critical metaphysics, or,
recourse to some epistemological structure, as in Kant’s transcendental logic,
where conditions of sensible experience must be enlisted to determine objects
by concepts. Such truth might seem to be of questionable value insofar as the
Idea contains concept and objectivity as purely logical terms, which lack any
resources for distinguishing one or the other from self-thinking thought as
something natural or spiritual. Yet this formality is crucial, for if the Idea
incorporated reference to non-logical terms, their difference and identity would
be taken for granted, instead of exhibiting a non-arbitrary agreement of their

alleged concept and objectivity. Hence, although the Idea incorporates nothing
of nature or mind, it supplies the determinacy of truth that anything further
qualified as non-logical would have to possess to be known to have an
objectivity in accord with conceptual determination.
Significantly, the move to the Idea is presented as something resulting
simply from the inner workings of objectivity. Instead of depending upon some
deus ex machina to set it in agreement with the concept, objectivity
progressively transforms itself from mechanism through chemism to teleology
whereby it arrives at making itself objectify the form of subjectivity as the
outcome of teleological process.9 Although only a complete determination of
the categories involved can certify this pathway, if it does so unfold, it would
suggest that the separation of concept and objectivity eliminates itself, that their
opposition resolves itself into a unity into which both are absorbed. Any claim
that concept and objectivity are incongruent would thereby be shown to rest
upon a falsification of their very own identities.
The resultant unity of the Idea thereby possesses an origin that would put
the lie to such retreats to the opposition of consciousness, for which concept
and objectivity are held apart as independently given correlates whose accord
depends upon an ever illusive bridge. The Idea, by contrast, can be duly
identified as the pure form of truth to the degree that it contains concept and
objectivity in their own immanent correspondence.101 What makes this
correspondence both objective and conceptually transparent is that, at least on
Hegel’s self-understanding, each side of the relation has determined itself to be
equivalent to its counterpart: through syllogism the concept has given itself
determinacy with the self-subsistent totality of objectivity11 whereas through
teleology objectivity has made itself subjective.12
The immediate unity of the Idea can not, however, be the end of the story.
The truth of the Idea is first presented as the structure of life, of organic unity.
The organism unifies its organs into a conceptual whole, whose universality is
the soul animating the particular organs whose own working reproduces their
union. What is lacking, however, is a separate conceptualization of the
Hegel, Science o f Logic, pp. 757-9.
12 Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik: Die Lehre vom Begriff (1816), pp. 156, 204;
Hegel, Science o f Logic, pp. 710, 753.
concurrence of soul and body, of the one in many and the totality that exhibits
its structure. Without a distinct concept of their correspondence the truth of the
Idea will not be an object of conceptual determination. If the Idea cannot
encompass this added feature, then the accord of concept and objectivity within
the Idea will not itself be in the form of the concept, but will only be
conceivable by an independent standpoint of dubious license.
The difficulty is overcome, however, if the Idea transforms itself so that the
unity of concept and objectivity is contained within it as a conceptual
determination corresponding to that unity. Hegel’s account of how life
develops into theoretical and practical cognition offers a metamorphosis of this
sort, arriving at a so-called Absolute Idea allegedly achieving correspondence
between the concept of the Idea and the Idea’s unity of concept and objectivity.
The resulting correspondence between the concept of the Idea and the Idea
itself ends up identified as the method of the whole process by which this
outcome has arisen.13
This notoriously elusive characterization becomes less indecipherable once
one considers how the correspondence between the concept of the Idea and the
Idea could not be formulated. Like the correspondence between concept and
objectivity, that between concept and Idea cannot reside in some third term. To
escape the plague of third man argument and other foundational appeals, each
side of the accord must posit its counterpart through its own determinacy. If
method were an external form applied to an independently given content,
method could hardly comprise the process whereby the accord of terms is
determined through themselves. The method would instead operate in the
traditional manner as an instrument for connecting terms that lack any intrinsic
connections. If method is instead the form of a self-developing content, that
form will contain the entire content within itself. For if the content is self-
ordering, the order of its self-presentation is wedded to the content. Further,
since the content of logic, of presuppositionless philosophy, determines itself
and since the concept is self-determined determinacy, the form or method of
logic will unfold the content in terms of the concept. Indeed, only the self-
determined factors of the concept could possibly organize the content, for any
terms that are not conceptual, i.e. self-determined, would cancel the content’s
autonomy by making it fit a heteronomous scheme. Accordingly, when Hegel
identifies the conceptualization of the Idea as the logical method, he proceeds
to briefly recapitulate the opening moves of the logic with the added twist of
describing how they can be reconsidered in terms of universality, particularity,
13 Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik: Die Lehre vom Begriff (1816), p. 287 ff;
Hegel, Science o f Logic, pp. 827 ff.
and individuality, the minimal components of the concept.14 This does not
involve mapping onto logic some independently given schema; it instead
comprises a self-organization of the content by terms that emerge within it as it
draws to its own close.
Although the details demand investigation like so much before, these
concluding moves add a final testimony to why autonomous determinacy and
the concept can be one. As all addicts of the concept must admit, the method of
philosophy inveterately revolves around conceptualization. The method of
logic, of presuppositionless science, is the ordering of the self-ordering of self-
thinking thought, an ordering that is defined by the categories of freedom. The
concept can be the privileged vehicle of philosophical method because the
autonomy of conceptual determination is the anatomy of truth.
14 Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik: Die Lehre vom Begriff (1816), pp. 287 ff.;
Hegel, Science of Logic, pp. 827 ff.
Chapter 5
From Concept to Judgment
Concept, judgment, and syllogism have perennially occupied a preeminent

position in the annals of logic. Usually, they have reigned as the privileged
elements of a formal logic, where, allegedly, they provide the anatomy of
thinking no matter what content thought conceives. If logic is to fulfill its
generic task of conceiving valid thinking, however, it cannot be a formal
science. Far from engaging a thinking indifferent to all content, logic must
validly conceive a very specific content, namely, valid thinking itself. Logic
will thereby differ from all other disciplines by possessing a content that cannot
diverge from the form by which it is thought. Since non-logical sciences
address a subject matter different from valid thinking, the method by which
their topic is properly ordered cannot be what they investigate. These other
sciences must therefore presuppose their method as either a dogmatic
assumption or as the result of some separate investigation of method proper.
This discrepancy between form and content or method and subject matter
equally applies to the “philosophy of science”, even if the latter’s meta-theory
of science purports to be an empirical knowing like its subject matter.
Although the reduction of the philosophy of science to a positive science seems
to render it a positive science of positive science, whose knowing and object
become equivalent, so long as the positive sciences under its scrutiny have
particular contents distinguishing them from that defining the philosophy of
science, the topic of the philosophy of science diverges from its subject matter.
This divergence is generic to any “meta-theory”, for if the difference between
the science and its object is eliminated, the meta-level collapses, together with
any preconception of either method or topic. Neither can then retain a given
character, for if the investigation and its subject matter become identical, their
predetermination leaves nothing left to investigate.
By contrast, logic can no more presuppose its method than it can assume the
content of valid thinking. As we have seen, since logic can properly determine
its content only by employing the same valid thinking that is its subject matter,
logic’s form and content, method and topic, or knowing and object known,
must be one and the same. Accordingly, if logic is not to beg its own question,
what and how it thinks must be concurrently established within logical
investigation.
This required unity of knowing and object in logic, which constitutively
defines logic’s self-thinking thought, might seem to preclude any role for
concept, judgment, or syllogism, given how all three have usually been
construed as forms of a cognition that stands distinct from its object.
Ordinarily, the concept is imagined to conceive a subject matter given apart
from its conceptualization, just as judgment is presumed to relate terms
subsisting independently of its connection and syllogism is taken to connect
judgments present outside the inference that concludes one from the others.
Yet, in each of these external roles, concept, judgment, and syllogism have
been accorded a privileged epistemic function. Traditional metaphysics has
recognized the concept to be the term by which the true nature or essence of
things is grasped, enabling judgments to expound the conceptual relations by
which true natures can be defined and allowing syllogism to delineate the
necessary connections by which genus and its species are differentiated. By
contrast, Kantian critical philosophy has retained the concept, not as the vehicle
for knowing a priori kinds or natures, but as the connecting term in judgments
that specify the temporal and spatio-temporal relations that any object of
knowledge must exhibit to be distinguished from a merely subjective
representation. Here even if concepts cannot determine any necessary types of
objects, objectivity cannot be known apart from necessary conceptual
connections between sensible representations. Similarly, the transcendental
turn redefines, rather than eliminates, the preeminent function of syllogism.
The absence of necessary natures may prevent syllogism from generating new
a priori universal knowledge, since necessary inferences can no longer be
drawn from what kind of thing an object may be. Yet syllogism still remains
what distinguishes reason from understanding by being the form that reason
must take to think, if not objectively know, the unconditioned characteristically
sought as the underlying ground of all objective judgments.12
1 For a further exploration of these issues, see William Maker, Philosophy

Without Foundations: Rethinking Hegel (Albany, NY: State University of New York
Press, 1994), pp. 106-114.
2 The tendency of contemporary formal logics to ignore syllogism in favor of a
more abstract propositional calculus reflects an abandonment of the Kantian
distinction between reason and understanding.
The Challenge of A Non-Formal Determination of Concept, Judgment,

and Syllogism
If concept, judgment, and syllogism are to make any, let alone any preeminent
contribution to truth, their respective forms cannot be construed in the terms of
reflection, where each is imbedded in a structure of cognition, be it
psychologically or linguistically described, that stands opposed to its object. If
a concept is to correspond with any object, each side of the relation must
exhibit the same determinacy. That is, there must be a determination of the
concept given apart from the additional clothing worn by the concept as a
factor in consciousness or language on the one hand and as a factor in
objectivity on the other. Similarly, if judgment and syllogism are to have truth,
they must be determinable independently of what gets added to enable them to
be actualized as forms of consciousness and discourse as well as in
corresponding objective embodiments. Unless concept, judgment, and
syllogism can be determined in their own right, apart from cognitive
frameworks or objective substrates, their purely logical determinacy will never
be obtained and the non-logical structures of mind and nature that incorporate
them will never have their logical components accounted for.
Yet how can concept, judgment, and syllogism be determined in a purely
logical manner without already presupposing them as the forms of thought that
must be employed in their own explication? How can logic meet its
requirement of uniting form and content without using the concept to think the
concept, without employing judgment to determine the forms of judgment,
without using syllogism to determine inference, without thereby having ready
at hand the very forms of thought which it is logic’s business to determine in
the first place?
What provides a solution to the looming circularity is the strategy pursued
in Hegel’s account of concept, judgment, and syllogism in the “Subjective
Logic” of his Science o f Logic. Owing to the contents, this is the section of
Hegel’s logic that most closely intersects with traditional logic. Yet, the manner
of the treatment and, to no small degree, the resulting categories, are radically
distinct from their customary incarnations.
To begin with, concept, judgment, and syllogism are all presented in their
own right. Although multifarious examples parade by for purposes of
illustration, the argument proper determines concept, judgment, and syllogism
without reference to any epistemological, psychological, or linguistic
frameworks in which they might figure or to any independently given objects
to which they relate.
Secondly, the order of their consideration is intimately connected to their
content. The absence of any defining reference to external factors leaves little
other option. The development must make do exclusively with what already
lies at hand within it. At each point, the category at issue, at least putatively,
gives rise to its successor in virtue of its own determination. Of course, to
engender such development, the terms under consideration cannot have a fixed
content, but must transform themselves, so as to generate a different term that
leads to other categories beyond itself due to its own dynamic. Consequently,
the order of treatment comprises an order of constitution, where a topic arises
only once all its prerequisites lie at hand. No gaps nor any additions are
possible, for the immanence of the development guarantees that the
determination in which concept, and then judgment, and finally syllogism
emerge is exhaustive and self-sufficient. Because order and content are wedded
together, any alternate route would have to involve entirely different
categories.3
These features, which all conform to the constitutive unity of method and
subject matter in logic’s self-thinking thought, provide negative guidelines for
evaluating the success of Hegel’s reconstruction of the traditional topics of
logic. Namely, the determination of concept, judgment, and syllogism must
never appeal to externally given materials, be they epistemological or
ontological factors, and the specification of terms must never rely upon any
more than what the preceding development has brought forward. If these
provisos can be satisfied, Hegel can accomplish what prior logicians hardly
even sought: a complete a priori account of the forms of concept, judgment,
and syllogism, detailed with a thoroughgoing necessity. Only then will it be
possible to assess just how central to thinking these perennially hallowed terms
can be.
Principal Guiding Theses in Hegel’s Subjective Logic
The overarching structure of Hegel’s account has an immediate plausibility,

that seems to share the direction of many past treatments. The concept is
analyzed first, followed by judgment and then by syllogism, an order that
3 The fact that the successive editions of Hegel’s Encyclopedia Logic and
Science of Logic present somewhat variant orderings of categories does not of itself
impugn either the necessity of immanent development or the systematicity of Hegel’s
own pioneering efforts. Not only may much of the variation involve terminological as
opposed to conceptual discrepancies, but the variation may reflect the uncovered
deficiency of early versions, rather than an equal validity for each alternate route. Of
course, that none of Hegel’s versions may be adequate in all respects still leaves
unchallenged the unique trajectory of categorial self-development.
makes evident sense, given how judgment connects concepts and how
syllogism infers judgments from one another. If the concept were not
accounted for prior to judgment and syllogism, these latter factors would
depend upon a component of unjustified character, whereas if judgment were
not developed before syllogism, syllogism would connect terms whose identity
remains uncertain.
What might seem less plausible is the deduction of the concept itself,
without which judgment and syllogism are left hanging. Hegel indicates that
this deduction consists in the development that has immediately preceded the
emergence of the concept, a development in which the two-tiered
determinations of the logic of essence reach the point at which the reciprocity
of causal interaction renders determiner and determined identical in structure,
eliminating the divide separating essence and appearance, ground and
grounded, and substance and accident. In virtue of this collapse of any
distinction between base and superstructure, what is independently determined
is no less posited and positedness is equally determined in and through itself.
The result is most clearly identifiable as the basic logic of self-
determination, for when cause and effect, determiner and determined, become
indistinguishable, what does the determining is what gets determined,
achieving the reflexivity of agent and patient enabling something to be what it
has determined itself to be,
Hegel identifies this new threshold as the logic of subjectivity,4 which fits
the bill given how self-determination is internal to a subject that retains each
emergent differentiation as a development of its own self. Substance is not
subject so long as its differentiations are mere accidents, contents adding
nothing to the identity of substance, which, for its part, can provide no
determinate principle for its own modifications. When, however, the
determinations are constitutive of the self and the unity of the self is the process
determining its own differentiation, a subjectivity has arisen in the dual sense
that all specification remains internal to an encompassing unity that must
engage in that specific determination to be at one with itself.
Less explicable, perhaps, is the next addition brought into play to categorize
the outcome of the logic of essence: the introduction of universality,
particularity, and individuality as the specific terms by which self-
determination, i.e. subjectivity, is minimally defined. The linkage might appear
questionable, in that universality, particularity, and individuality are
customarily presumed to apply without restriction beyond what is self-
determined. From Aristotle on, the ubiquitous refrain has been that everything
that is is individual, be it rational agent, sub-rational organism, or inanimate

thing, and that universal and particular apply equally indiscriminately. Yet, a
strong case can be made that universality, particularity, and individuality
provide the indispensable categories for determining freedom in thought or
reality. As Hegel illustrates with the example of the will in the introduction to
the Philosophy ofRight,5the self that determines itself is universal insofar as it
remains self-identical in all its differentiations, yet can abstract from each in
virtue of not being limited to any one of the contents it gives itself. Because,
further, the self that determines itself must give itself content in which it
remains at one with itself as self-determining, it is equally characterized by
particularity, that difference which is the otherness of the universal that remains
the vehicle of its encompassing unity. Finally, because what is self-determined
remains self-identical in its particular determinations, freedom has
individuality, understood as the determinate that is determined in and through
itself, instead of having its character depend upon contrast to an independent
other or reflection in some appearance.
Although these connections might be thought to exhibit the dependence of
self-determination upon universality, particularity, and individuality, the
reverse can equally be maintained. For if what is not self-determined is
determinate either through contrast to an other, as in the given determinacy of
the logic of being, or through reflection in what it posits, as in the posited
determinacy of the logic of essence, universality will be wanting. Something
and other may be distinct, but so long as they owe their difference to their
qualitative contrast, each has a different quality. Accordingly, the qualitative
determinacy of the logic of being cannot figure as a universal, equally at hand
in each of its particulars. Similarly, essence may have determinacy in virtue of
its appearance, but it does not stand to its manifestation as a universal relates to
its particularization. For whereas the universal enjoys its characteristic unity as
a one over many, bridging any gulf between itself and the particulars in which
it communes with itself, essence maintains its defining primacy over its
appearance not by relating a plurality of appearances to one another, but by
preceding them all as their positor.
These connections may seal the intimate linkage between self-determination
and the categories of universality, particularity, and individuality, but neither
that tie nor the related one to subjectivity immediately bring to mind the
concept. The concept may commonly count as the privileged vehicle of reason
5 G.W.F. Hegel, Werke 7: Grundlinien der Philosophic des Rechts (Frankfurt am

Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 115-7, pp. 49-54; G. W. F. Hegel, Elements o f the
Philosophy o f Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 1991), 115-7, pp. 37-42.
with which philosophy seeks to capture the truth, but why should that
connotation have any special relation to self-determination or universality,
particularity, and individuality?
The room for questioning partly derives from the common conflation of the
concept with representation that Hegel so often bewails. If thought be
identified with consciousness, and the concept be made an all-purpose idea
encompassing all representations, it may well serve the function of correct
understanding, that is, of providing a mental content that can match given
appearances in all their variegation. Since this involves representations of a
given content, which may appropriately be received in the form of impressions
via the passivity of sensibility, self-determination seems to be the last
requirement that concepts could have. Indeed, if the standpoint of
consciousness is identified with cognition in general, then all thought is
representational, conditioned by independent givens and governed by the
demand for correct representation of what appears. Yet representational
cognition is precisely what must be left behind to achieve the autonomy of
reason that the self-thinking thought of logic must involve, for the unity of
topic and method in logic precludes the difference between knowing and its
object on which the representational cognition of consciousness depends.6
Accordingly, the concept can no longer serve as a vehicle of philosophy unless
it exhibits the self-determined structure that reason thinks when it thinks
autonomously. Only then can the concept realize the unity of form and content
that logic must achieve to think validly valid thinking; only then will the
concept be what Hegel aptly calls an infinite form,7 a self-realizing, creative
process that does not need a given material to realize itself, as does any finite
form, limited by standing in relation to some external content. Then, if
universality, particularity, and individuality are the constitutive categories for
thinking and being what is self-determined, the concept will be plausibly
6 For this reason, logic presupposes overcoming the opposition of consciousness,

something that Hegel seeks to achieve in The Phenomenology o f Spirit, which
observes how the structure of consciousness eliminates itself as the hegemonic
principle of knowing by subjecting its own truth claims to self-examination and
discovering that when consciousness’ relation to its object becomes identical to the
object as it is purportedly in itself, an identity required for true knowing, the
distinction between knowing and its object collapses, removing consciousness as the
foundation of knowledge. For a more sustained analysis of how and why logic
presupposes the overcoming of the opposition of consciousness, see Maker,
Philosophy Without Foundations, pp. 47-98.
7 Hegel, Werke 8, addition 2 to 11163, p. 313; Hegel, Logic , addition 2 to H163,
p. 228.
characterized in their terms.

By being self-determined in character, the concept could no longer provide
the measure of correctness with antecedent givens, with all the insurmountable
difficulties that poses for certifying correspondence. Nor would the concept be
amenable to grasping some construct of a reflecting understanding, better
determinable by categories of essence. Instead, the autonomy, that is, the
subjectivity of the concept would make conceptual determinacy precisely what
is needed to capture a self-developing subject matter, such as the truth could be
in its own right, once liberated from the veil of a determining reflection.
These considerations depend upon applications of the concept to a
conceptually determinate objectivity and then to the unity of both in the “Idea”
of truth. These further applications permit the subjectivity of the concept to
manifest the negative character of lacking objectivity, by which the concept
equally gets branded as being neither objectivity nor Idea, but just the “mere”
concept, determined immediately in its own right, independently of any relation
to objectivity or to the Idea’s unity of concept and objectivity.
Long before these topics become thematic, Hegel presents evidence
confirming the tie between the concept and the terms of self-determination by
showing how judgment arises from the completed specification of universality,
particularity, and individuality. If judgment is their progeny and judgment has
its element in the concept, the logic of self-determination can prove a deserving
bearer of the title, “the logic of the concept”. Not only will self-determination
afford the concept the means to capture what is determined in its own right, but
the individuality of freedom will show itself to be the key prerequisite
engendering judgment, so critical for conceptually determining the relation
between concepts. In this way, the purportedly constitutive components of the
concept will secure the connection to judgment and, by extension, to syllogism,
enabling the concept to recover a familiar guise for its newly unveiled
character.
Universality, Particularity, and Individuality in Anticipated Connection
Hegel presents universality, particularity, and individuality in succession as the

constitutive elements of self-determination, subjectivity, and the concept. The
implications of these connections are far-ranging, but of equal and inseparable
importance is the way in which universality, particularity, and individuality are
determined and how their contents wed themselves together. On the one hand,
universality is presented as the point of departure, which then engenders
particularity, which, for its part, develops into individuality. On the other hand,
each term has its determination in relation to the other two and through this
relation ends up taking on the character of each, thereby proving itself to be a

totality of all three terms. These relationships are correlative. Because the serial
unfolding of universality, particularity, and individuality takes the form of a
putatively immanent development, each successive term is generated by its
predecessor. Hence, universality ends up resolving itself into particularity and,
by way o f particularity, into individuality, whereas particularity figures as a
self-transformation of universality and, in virtue of that connection, as
individuality, just as individuality comes to stand as the term that the universal
has become through the mediation of its self-transformation into particularity.
This fluid prospectus stands in radical contrast to the all too commonplace
separation of universal and particular that has led so many past philosophers to
ignore the distinction between particularity and individuality and to treat them
indiscriminately. Whether one follows the “Platonic” route and conceives the
universal to exist apart as an intelligible reality, detached from the phenomenal
realm of particulars, or follows the nominalist rejoinder of conceiving
particulars to be an objective reality completely divorced from the subjective
thinking in which universals are confined, a fixed, exclusive opposition is
presumed that Hegel’s account obliterates.
The ignored inseparability of universality, particularity, and individuality is
easiest to grasp in considering abstract quality, class, and genus, the most
familiar types of universality.8These determinate, particular universalities arise
within the development of the first three forms of judgment, the qualitative
judgment, the judgment of reflection, and the judgment of necessity. Although
the relationship of universality, particularity, and individuality within these
forms cannot fail to illustrate what is generic to the concept, the concept of the
concept will have to provide an account of universal, particular, and individual
that is intelligible without reference to the more concrete content distinguishing
particular types of concepts. On the other hand, the additional determinacy that
permits forms of concepts to be differentiated will have to result from the
concept of the concept, since any other origin would destroy the systematic
immanence of the argument by injecting extraneous assumptions for which no
account has been given.
8 Class and genus might both be disqualified as forms of universality if one

identifies universals with inhering qualities and observes that class and genus cannot
be predicated of individuals. Yet that class and genus have individuality,
distinguishing each class and genus from every other, is something class and genus
share with inhering properties, for even inhering property as such has a determinacy
differentiating it from every other instance of what inheres. For further discussion of
how universality ineluctably entails individuality, see Winfield, Freedom and
Modernity, pp. 51-58.
Nonetheless, if we consider these three forms of universality in the order of

their development in the logic of judgment, we encounter the relationship of
universal, particular, and individual in three variations that provide an
accessible point of contrast for distinguishing the elementary unity that
underlies them all.
The universal of abstract quality displays its intensional relation of
attribution, or inherence, in the subject-predicate relation of qualitative
judgment. Although it provides the most common exemplar of a universal
allegedly existing apart from its particulars, it is easy to see how a quality that
inheres in particular instances cannot be common to them unless it stands in
relation to particularity and individuality. As particular, each instance of the
shared quality comprises an undifferentiated example, standing in an identical
relation to the quality they hold in common. Qua instance, each particular
relates to the quality they share in the same way: they exemplify it and in that
respect they are completely alike. The quality that inheres in each particular,
must, however, be applicable to a plurality of cases if it is to retain its
constitutive generality. Consequently, something must provide for an
individuation of particulars. Unless they can be differentiated, they collapse
into one, eliminating the inherence in a plurality characterizing universal
quality. For this reason, each particular case of the universal quality must
equally be a differentiated example, that is, an individual, distinct from every
other. Far from having a separate existence, whereby it can exist apart from
particulars, the abstract universal cannot have its own identity unless it stands
in relation to both particularity and individuality.
The universality of class, whose extensional relation of set membership, of
subsumption, is realized in the quantitative judgments of reflection, exhibits a
completely analogous linkage of universality, particularity, and individuality.
Even though a class of one or a null class may be entertained, class forfeits its
significance as a form of universality unless it can contain the extensional
relationship of plural class membership, from within whose horizon
quantitative judgments can be made about all, some, or one member. As a class
member, each particular belongs to the class in the same way, falling under its
extension without further qualification. Yet, if the plurality of class
membership is to sustain itself, members cannot just be particular,
undifferentiated members; like the instances of the inherence of universal
quality, class members must also be distinguished, and this requires an
individuation supervening upon their common subsumption under the class.
Consequently, class cannot retain its universal extension unless its members are
both particular and individual.
The case of genus points even more decidedly to the inseparability of
universal, particular, and individual, for whereas both universal quality and
class leave completely undetermined what other features their particulars may
possess alongside the universal they share, in genus, the universal determines
defining features by which its particulars are distinguished. In this manner, the
genus differentiates itself into definite species, whose distinguishing character
follows from the unity of the genus, as even and odd follows from number.
This enables the genus to provide the field for necessary judgments about what
must hold true of its particulars. Although the determining relation between
genus and species binds universal and particular together, it does so with such
concreteness that the particular seems already individuated through the
universal in virtue of being a particular species. Classical philosophy, which
privileges the universality of genus in its metaphysics of substance, is thereby
led to conflate the particular and the individual. Yet classical philosophy is
compelled to acknowledge that as much as species may be distinguished from
one another, the species is not itself the individual, which belongs to the
species much as the individuated member belongs to its class. Just as
subsumption under class leaves undetermined every other feature individuating
its members, so inclusion in a species leaves undetermined what distinguishes
one species member from another. Consequently, whereas the differentia of
species maybe the object of necessary judgments, the individuating qualities of
their members are objects of the same contingent, ultimately empirical
judgments as those pertaining to the inherence of abstract universals.9 The
addition of a distinct relation to individuality therefore becomes mandatory, for
unless the genus has not only species whose differentia it defines, but a further
individuation of species members, species cannot have their own constitutive
identity as subordinate groups, standing like a class to their own members as
well as like a necessarily determined particularization of their genus.
In each of these three types of universality, the universal depends for its
constitutive identity upon both particularity and individuality, where
particularity comprises an undifferentiated instance and individuality comprises
a differentiated particularization. Indeed, in each case, the three categories
appear to be coeval, for without the universal and particular, the individual
cannot have an instance to differentiate from others, just as without the
universal and individual, the particular cannot be one exemplification among
others of a common unity.
Because these comparisons depend upon our reflection upon the stipulated
content culled from the course of the three forms of judgment in which
universality, particularity, and individuality all take on specific forms, the
universal determination of the concept must be certified by turning to the
9 Michael B. Foster develops these points in his article, “The Concrete Universal:
Cook Wilson and Bosanquet” (Mind, Vol. XL, No. 157, January 1931), 4, 9-10.
account of the concept per se, which precedes and provides the elements from
and through which judgment allegedly arises.
The Concept of the Concept
Hegel presents this account as the concept of the concept, which would seem to
provide that unity of form and content that is the element of logic’s self-
thinking thought. Significantly, Hegel also maintains that every preceding
category equally involves the concept of its respective determinacy.101The
reason for this general extension of the concept to the form of each and every
other logical category is that they all, qua logical, should emerge within an
immanent development. With appeal to the given and employment of any
external methodological principle both excluded, each category must be
independently determined in its own right and thereby no less transform itself,
giving rise to a further category that equally engenders what is other to itself by
virtue of its own determination. This movement of determinate negation can be
considered the concept of each category insofar as each term develops itself,
exhibiting the self-determination that amounts to its conceptual determinacy.11
The concept of the concept brings this autonomous conceptuality to itself to the
degree that the development of the concept per se moves itself along through
its own immanence.
When Hegel opens the account of the concept with the category of
universality, several questions pose themselves that demand a united response.
First, why is universality what is immediately at hand once determiner and
determined lose their distinction, eliminating the logic of essence’s defining
two-tiered structure of determined determinacy? Secondly, how can
universality come first, if universality is inseparably linked to particularity and
individuality? Is the serial order of universality, particularity, and individuality
simply an expositional convenience, successively describing what are really
coeval elements of the same totality? Adding further ambiguity to the opening
and its two successor developments is the dual characterization given each
stage. Namely, the starting point is described both as universality and as the
11 In this connection, Hegel maintains that the categories are grasped as
determinate concepts insofar as each is known as being in unity with its other. That
unity is, of course, precisely what determinate negation involves, where a category
engenders something different from itself as its own truth. See Hegel, Wissenschaft der
universal concept, just as the next step is characterized both as particularity and
the particular concept, and the concluding moment is determined both as
individuality and the individual concept.12
The answer to all these perplexities must be found together, for all that can
provide clarity is what lies at hand in the outcome of reciprocal determination.
The collapse of the distinction between determiner and determiner has led to
the threshold of self-determination, where what is determined in its own right,
being-in-and-for-itself, is posited determinacy or positedness, where what
determines and what is determined are indistinguishable.
If conceptual determinacy be self-determined determinacy, then the starting
point of the concept is plausibly the universal concept provided this signifies
the concept in general, without any further qualification. The particular concept
minimally requires, as the subsequent account of particularity will show, a
contrast to the universal concept, a contrast by which the concept has two
contrasting instances or particular determinations: universality and
particularity, the universal and the particular concepts. At the outset, only one
can be at hand, a determination of the concept that is yet to stand in relation to
what it determines itself to be. In other words, the concept, to begin with, is
only the universal concept, for a multiplicity of concept determinations,
particularizing it, has not emerged.
To identify the concept in its immediacy as the universal concept would
seem to presuppose the category of universality. Yet universality is allegedly
just what the concept immediately offers. How can the universal concept and
universality be coeval?
The minimal reciprocity of self-determination supplies the answer. Even if
to start with the concept cannot have given itself new determinacy, the identity
of determiner and determined, of being-in-and-for-itself and positedness,
entails that every determinacy in the concept’s constitutive self-determination
is equally the concept as a whole. The concept does not determine an other, as
something provides the defining boundary for what it is not, nor does the
concept determine a reflection through which it appears as determining. As
self-determined, the concept determines itself and each and every
differentiation it generates is itself as so-determined. Hence, if, at the outset,
the concept is universal, universality is what the concept is immediately in its
entirety. Universality is then the universal concept, for the determinacy of the
concept is a self-determined determinacy, identical with the self that gives itself
this content. Accordingly, when the concept engenders particularity, this is its
own particularity, rendering particularity the particular concept. Analogously,
12 Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik: Die Lehre vom Begriff (1816), pp. 33,38,55;
Hegel, Science o f Logic, pp. 601, 605, 620.
when the concept generates individuality, this individuality is both a

differentiation of the concept and the individual concept itself.
Granted that the concept cannot already be particular at its debut, yet has
some determinacy that is both a stage in its development and the concept as a
whole, the question still remains as to why the starting point comprises
universality and how it can do so without already bringing in particularity and
individuality. The inseparability of universal, particular, and individual in
inhering attribute, class, and genus would seem to belie any beginning with just
universality, but perhaps this belying rests on too rigid of view of these
categories. For if universality, not to mention particularity and individuality, is
not a fixed term, whose rigidity requires an external connector to link it to any
other factor, but instead a dynamic category that transforms itself and thereby
relates itself to additional content that it encompasses, their inseparability may
not be incompatible with an initial priority for the universal. Although the
universal may be the concept in its immediacy, the universal may just as
immediately relate itself to the particular as its own difference and, through the
mediation of this relation, engender individuality as the third element in its own
identity of identity and difference, i.e. in the encompassing universality that
unites universality and particularity in individuality. In this way, the universal
can start its career as a first term, yet just as soon establish its unity with the
particular by which it closes into individuality.
If illicit introduction of extraneous content is to be avoided, the dynamic
character of universality, as the universal concept, must follow from nothing
but the immediate unity of positedness and being-in-and-for-itself, i.e. of
determined determinacy and its determiner. This unity has resulted from the
negation, the self-elimination of their difference, an outcome of the
irrepressible reversal of roles by which the determiner figures as a determiner
only in virtue of something it determines, which thereby determines the
determiner, reducing the latter to a determined factor as well. Although the
resulting unity is mediated by that role reversal, that process equally removes
itself as a conditioning factor, leaving an immediacy because what determines
itself no longer rests upon any antecedent ground. This resulting, but
immediate unity is equivalent to the immediate determinacy of freedom, or
subjectivity, or that which is what it has determined itself to be.
But what is self-determination at the outset? It cannot already have
determined itself. As the immediacy of self-determined determinacy, it must
instead be poised to give itself determinacy, not by standing in contrast to some
other, nor by shining forth in some subsidiary appearance, but by being
identical with the difference it posits in virtue of being what it is. That
prospective unity, which is by canceling its indeterminacy and differentiating
itself exclusively by its own means, is the identity that universality has as the
initial stage of self-determination. Because this identity, issuing from the

collapse of determined determinacy, is, at this juncture, all that self-
determination comprises, it is the concept in its minimal entirety, the universal
concept, the determinacy that is about to differentiate itself without ever going
beyond itself.
If this seems too impoverished a description to qualify as the universal, or,
for that matter, as the concept or subjectivity, this can only be because of a
misguided expectation to have more given content at the start and to have a
fixed term that is immediately everything that it turns out to be. Yet, if the
universal is a constitutive term of self-determination, it cannot have further
quality than being that which will remain in unity with itself in its self-
differentiation. After all, if universality had additional filling it would not only
already be particular, but have a character that it had not given itself through its
self-determination. Moreover, if the universal were fully manifest immediately,
it could not be self-determining. Although the universal cannot have given
determinacy, it is not just an indeterminate immediacy, like being. The
universal does have character, but the character in question is nothing but the
poised self-differentiating unity that is the minimal threshold of freedom.
Given just what it is, the universal presents neither any obstacle nor any
intermediary transition between it, as the universal concept, and the difference
it gives itself to determine itself and thereby develop into the particular
concept. To be universality and not just being or essence, the indeterminacy of
the universal concept must immediately generate determinacy and determinacy
of a specifically self-determined kind. To determine itself as the unity of
determiner and determined, the universal concept must give itself a content that
is different from the universal, yet characterized in terms of no other contrast or
positing. This non-universal, this negation of the universal, must remain in
continuity with the universal concept because the emergent difference is no less
a determination of the self-same subject that inhabits the universal as well.
Because the differentiation of self-determined determinacy, of the universal
concept, derives exclusively from the determinacy underway determining itself,
the difference cannot stand distinguished from other independently given
differences, as one particular opposing others. Instead, the differentiation that
universality immediately generates is particularity as such, not a particular,
already contrasted with others, but the particular concept as a whole.
Unlike the specifications of particularity in the judgments of quality,
reflection and necessity, where the respective universals entail a plurality of
particulars distinguished by individuality, the concept of particularity per se
cannot already involve a multiplicity of particulars, individuated by factors
given independently of the universal. All that lies at hand as legitimate
conceptual resources are universality and the determinacy it distinguishes from
itself.13 Although this leaves universality and particularity as the only

determinations so far constitutive of self-determination, their contrast with one
another immediately alters their respective character in a manner that becomes
characteristic of every development in conceptual determination. The moment
particularity emerges over and against universality, each of these terms figures
both as a stage and as a coeval differentiation of the unitary subject
determining itself through their development. Instead of having just one self-
same particularity, the differentiation of the concept now has two contrastable,
qualitatively distinct terms, namely the particular and the universal.
Particularity has thereby acquired two species: the particular and the universal,
through each of which the universal runs unencumbered in its encompassing
self-identity.14
Whereas the plurality of particulars in the judgments of quality, reflection,
and necessity, depended upon individuality, the distinction of particularity and
universality as elements of the concept does not already depend upon
individuality. Instead, particularity and universality provide sufficient resources
for the initial differentiation of self-determination, as they must if individuality
is to follow from them, instead of being their coeval partner.
Yet, by the same token, particularity and universality directly provide all
that is required to generate individuality as the third differentiation of the
concept. By determining itself, as it must immediately do to prove itself to be
universal, the universal concept gave itself the difference of particularity,
which just as immediately applied to universality as it stood distinguished from
particularity. Hence, not only is the universal the particular in its contrast to
particularity, but the particular is universal, insofar as it encompasses the
particular and the universal as its own two exemplifications. Although the unity
of the particular and the universal is determined in and through the universal
and the particular themselves, it is no less something different from either,
taken separately.
Hegel, of course, identifies this resulting unity as the individual, but its
defining character seems distinctly different from that of individuality as it
figures in the judgments of quality, reflection, and necessity in relation to the
universals of inhering attribute, class, and genus and their respective
particulars. In each of these cases, individuality functions as the differentiated
particular, sustaining the plurality of particulars upon which universality
depends. Here individuality as such emerges as the particularized universal, the
determinate subject, the determinacy determined in and through itself.15
Admittedly, both descriptions fit ordinary notions of individuality. On the
one hand, the individual is not just an instance or class member in general, but
a unique instance and member. On the other hand, to be unique, the individual
must be determined in virtue of itself. Contrast with another is inadequate,
since that mode of contrastive determination, defining the categories of the
logic of being, leaves something and its other each with the same dual
character (qua something and as the other of something else), resulting in at
best an endless dissemination of meaning, where negation supplies
determinacy, but never individuation. Determination by an external ground is
insufficient as well, since the foundational determinacy characterizing the
categories of the logic of essence refers each term back to the same foundation,
without providing resources for distinguishing them further. Finally, recourse
to universality and particularity alone will not suffice, as the Russellian theory
of definite description would like to believe, because any collection of general
properties could always be duplicated unless they or their assortment be tied to
something that is already individuated.
Although both characterizations of individuality are thus plausible, it is easy
to see that they are not mutually exclusive. First of all, the individual as the
differentiated particular is derivative of the individual as the particularized
universal, as should be the case, if judgment presupposes the concept.
Secondly, the particularized universal determines itself as a differentiated
particular, as also should be expected, if the determinacy of judgment is to
issue from the concept.
The dependency of the differentiation of particulars upon the particularized
universal is evident once attention is focused upon how a plurality of
particulars are to be differentiated. As the above survey suggests, the only
sufficient resource for enabling a particular to be unique is the determinacy
whereby a subject is determinate in and through itself. Neither negation (i.e.
the contrast to an other), nor positing (i.e. the appeal to a ground), nor appeal to
mere universals can do what the particularized universal of individuality
accomplishes. Consequently, the individuality of instances and of class and
species members must incorporate the more basic specification with which
individuality gets baptized in the concept of the concept.
On the other hand, individuality cannot help but be a differentiated
particular because it, like universality and particularity, takes on the
determinacy of each of the other elements of the concept. Once individuality
arises from the unity of universal and particular, the self-determined subject of
the concept has three differentiations: the universal, the particular, and the
individual. Thus, particularity applies to not only the particular and the
universal, but the individual as well. Moreover, because the universal,
particular, and individual are qualitatively distinct, the individual is a
differentiated particular, like its two counterparts in the concept.
These role reversals are not, however, the end of the story. Because each of
the three particulars of the concept, the universal, the particular, and the
individual, are determinations of the self-identical subject underway
determining itself, each is the particularized universality defining individuality.
Not only is the individual individual, but so therefore are the universal and the
particular. Then, of course, individuality is itself universal, for it pervades all
three of the components of the concept. Taken together with the preceding
developments wherein the universal and individual became particular and the
particular became universal, the emergent universality of individuality signifies
that each and every determination of the concept exhibits the totality of
conceptual determinacy as it has so far established itself. The universal is
particular and individual, the particular is universal and individual, and the
individual is particular and universal. In this manner, each term has come to
incorporate the entire process of the concept, i.e. of self-determination p e rse .
As a consequence, the concept has issued in a relation between concepts,
whereby not just universality and individuality exhibit particularity, but the
totality of conceptual determinacy becomes determinate, as one totality
standing in contrast to another.
From Concept to Judgment
Hegel identifies this result as the emergence of judgment from the concept. The
identification seems apt once linguistic, psychological, and epistemological
considerations are left aside and judgment is considered exclusively logically
as a determinacy immediately relating concepts to one another.
Although Hegel proceeds to describe judgment in terms of a relation of
subject and predicate, he is adamant in distinguishing the logical determinacy
of judgment from ordinary notions that conflate judgment with propositions
that link representations in general, thanks to an external “judge” who connects
terms that are antecedently given apart from their relation in the ensuing
proposition.16
Hegel, Science o f Logic, pp. 626, 627; Hegel, Werke 8, H167, p. 319; Hegel,
Logic,^\61, pp. 232-3.
The outcome of individuality allows for none of this because the terms that
stand in relation are concepts, rather than representations in general, and if
these concepts are determinate, they are so not through any reference to objects
within a supervening structure of reference, but solely in virtue of their contrast
with one another as particular. The only terms legitimately available are, on the
one hand, those by which the concept is structured, namely, universality,
particularity, and individuality, and, on the other hand, the category capturing
the relation by which the determinate concepts are connected. Since the
emergence of determinate concepts is the immediate result of each conceptual
element figuring as the totality of the concept, the independent conceptual
terms oppose one another immediately. The appropriate connector is therefore
“is”, expressing how their relation has the form of being, completely
unmediated and otherwise indeterminate.
This fits judgment to the degree that judgment unites conceptual terms by a
copula in the form of being, a copula that simply asserts that one term is the
other. Less obvious is the role the copula plays as the connector of subject and
predicate, the two terms traditionally associated with the basic form of
judgment. These terms are adopted for use by Hegel with the fundamental
qualification that subject and predicate are not representations in general, to
which any content can be ascribed, but particular concepts, which is to say,
particular determinations of the concept: universality, particularity, or
individuality. Limiting subject and predicate to conceptual determinations
instead of treating them as free or, for that matter, bound variables, is in accord
with the systematic demands of logic, for which no content is admissible that
does not arise immanently from what has already been established. This
constitutive connection between the form of judgment and specific conceptual
content marks the fundamental divide between the doctrine of judgment in the
Science o f Logic and the treatment of judgment in formal logic.
Given the immediacy in the relation of judgment and the conceptual
specificity of its content, one might expect particular types of judgment to be
distinguished according to which conceptual terms occupy the respective
positions of subject and predicate, producing a taxonomy of “the universal is
the individual”, “the universal is the particular”, “the particular is the
individual”, “the particular is the universal”, “the individual is the universal”,
“the individual is the particular”, and the three tautologies of “the universal is
the universal”, “the particular is the particular”, and “the individual is the
individual”. Although Hegel makes mention of “the individual is the
individual” and “the universal is the universal” in regard to the infinite
judgment of determinate being,17he excludes the latter three pairings because
17 Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik: Die Lehre vom Begrijf (1816), pp. 78,79-80;
they remove the qualitative difference of terms on which judgment’s

connecting depends. Moreover, although Hegel does allow different conceptual
terms to occupy alternately the positions of subject and predicate, the relation
between the terms ends up varying together with the type of universal,
particular, and individual that each respective judgment connects.
On the one hand, Hegel prospectively limits the paired terms of judgment to
three basic options: “the individual is the universal”, “the particular is the
universal”, and “the individual is the particular”.18 The rationale for this
limitation is that judgment opposes subject and predicate as the more
determinate and the more universal respectively, and that individual, particular
and universal stand in an order of decreasing determinacy and increasing
generality.19
On the other hand, Hegel groups the forms of judgment into three broad
divisions, such that the concept is determined by the particular concept first in
terms of the categories of being, then in terms of the categories of essence, and
then in terms of the categories of the concept.20 If, as the preceding
development purports to establish, the contrastive determinacy of being, the
determined determinacy of essence, and the self-determined determinacy of the
concept exhaust the basic forms of determinacy, one should expect that
judgment’s specification of the concept by its particular components will
complete itself in proceeding through these fundamental options.
Before any of these promissory claims can be evaluated, a basic problem
must be resolved on which depends the entire transition from concept to
judgment. The problem is twofold. To begin with, why should the relation of
independent conceptual terms be an immediate connection of just two terms? If
each category of the concept ends up determined as an individuality exhibiting
the totality of their moments, why is there not a threesome at hand? On the
other hand, even if judgment relates only two terms, why should the
independent conceptual factors resulting from individuality be specifically
related as subject and predicate? The subject-predicate relation seems to be not
just bipolar, but non-transitive. If the connection of particular concepts is
immediate, should it not be a matter of indifference whether a term occupies
one side of the copula or the other?
Hegel, Science o f Logic, pp. 641, 642-3.

20 Hegel, Werke 8, addition to HI71, p. 322; Hegel, Logic, addition to 11171,
p. 236.
Compounding these perplexities is Hegel’s additional claim that the

judgment issuing from the self-determination of individuality not only involves
subject and predicate, but a subject determined as individual and a predicate
determined as universal.21 Why should the totalization of the moments of the
concept issue in an immediate relation of just these two terms in just this
arrangement?
At the end of his account of individuality, Hegel describes how
individuality exhibits the character of being a qualitative one, repelling itself
from itself, in a generation of a plurality of many other ones.22 Since each of
the three components of the concept has taken on individuality, as totalities
joining universality and particularity, Hegel’s claim is supported, with the
caveat that the many in question would seem to be a threesome. This triplicity
of the related totalities seems indicated by the fact that, as Hegel observes in
paragraph 165 of the Encyclopedia Logic, individuality has both independently
differentiated the concept components, while just as much positing their
identity.23 Although this underscores the accompanying claim that the
judgment is the posited particularity of the concept,24 it still leaves unexplained
how judgment will connect only two conceptual terms.
The needed explanation, however, is near a hand. As Hegel elsewhere
points out, because these totalities are still moments of the concept, they are
united by universality.25 Since, however, each moment has become an
independent totality, determined in and through itself as a determinate subject,
the universal relates to each as merely an indifferent one, standing in the same
relation to the universal as any of its counterparts. As a consequence,
universality is merely their commonality, an abstract universal that they all
share, without otherwise determining them.26 Hence, even if the individual
excludes other individuals, the relationship between them, the universality
linking them together, is the bipolar connection where an immediate individual
is determined by an abstract universal such as held in common by an indefinite
number of other immediate individuals. The individual in question is
23 Hegel, Werke 8, H165, p. 315; Hegel, Logic, H165, pp.229-30.
24 Hegel, Werke 8 ,11165, p. 315; Hegel, Logic, H165, pp.229-30.
immediate because it is a self-determined totality, determined in and through

itself rather than through the mediation of other terms. At the same time,
judgment equally relates it to a universal that can have the same external link to
other such individuals.
These ramifications lend support to the bipolar relation of judgment and the
identification of the connected terms as, on the one hand, an immediate
individual and, on the other, an abstract universal, inhering in the individual as
an instance of itself without otherwise determining it. Even though the
individual is an individual among others, the only relation by which they stand
related is the connection each has to the universal they share in common, a
universal which cannot further determine their respective characters since these
are determined in and through themselves.
Moreover, because the two terms are now qualitatively distinct, judgment
can have, as it minimally emerges from the concept, a non-transitive
connection aptly identifiable as the relation of subject and predicate. Subject
and predicate are appropriate qualifiers insofar as they capture the salient
features that the immediate individual and the abstract universal possess in the
relationship by which the copula joins them. Although the immediate
connection expressed by the copula does not itself privilege one direction over
the other, the qualitatively distinct conceptual character of each term gives
them different roles in the relationship. Because the immediate individual is an
independent totality, it has a determinacy extending beyond the universal
attribute that the judgment ascribes to it. Accordingly, this universal inheres in
it, as one attribute among manifold others. The immediate individual thus
figures as the subject of the judgment, enjoying a prior determinacy of its own
to which the abstract universal is now joined. By contrast, because this
universal is abstract in the sense of being one among other determinations
possessed by the individual, it figures as a predicate, predicated upon the
individual that provides the underlying substrate for its attribution. Just as the
individual is now a determinate individual, rather than individuality/?^ se, so
the universal is a determinate universal, the universal of inhering attribute,
rather than universality in general. So, too, judgment, as it immediately arises
from individuality, has a minimal determinacy that will prove to be a particular
form of judgment, the judgment of quality or determinate being, once further
forms have arisen to contrast to it.
O f course, if any such forms are to emerge, they must do so through the
dynamic internal to the qualitative judgment in which individuality has issued.
Following out that prospective development is the task awaiting the theory of
judgment that can prepare the way for a theory of inference worthy of logical
science. Whether Hegel’s pioneering efforts have met the challenge must now
be addressed.
Chapter 6
The Forms o f Judgment

and the Types o f Universals
The forms of judgment are widely recognized to be central to thinking and to

knowing objectivity. Seldom, however, have the necessity, interrelation, and
completeness of these forms been investigated. Although Kant can be credited
for having brought them to center stage, he is notorious for failing to account
for their diversity or for that of the categories he finds rooted in each form. As
he himself would have to admit, assurances that judgment is found in certain
shapes relating terms through certain concepts can never validate any claims
holding universally for either thinking or objective knowledge. At best, what is
culled from tradition or psychological observation can support corrigible
descriptive claims of contingent local application.
To be conceived as such, independently of any conditional empirical
content, judgment must not be considered in relation to any specific concepts
that happen to be predicated of a subject. Instead, judgment must be examined
in respect to the concept in general. Moreover, judgment per se must not
predicate the concept in regard to any specific, contingently given subject.
Rather, judgment, considered as such, must predicate the concept to the subject
as such. To be logically rather than empirically determined, the subject can
have no further content than the particular or the individual. These contents are
themselves intrinsic to the concept. This is because the concept, logically
speaking, is the universal and the universal constitutively involves both the
particular and the individual. Without differentiating itself through the
particular, the universal cannot have its encompassing identity, whereas by
being at one with itself in the particular, the universal engenders the individual,
that which owes its differentiation to itself, enabling the particular to be
distinguishable from other particulars and the universal to be a one over many.
Accordingly, judgment will constitutively relate these necessary elements of
the concept, of universality, to one another. In determining the subject by the
predicate to which it gets connected, judgment will accordingly determine the
concept by its own elements, as related externally to one another through the
immediate connection of the copula. This connection is immediate insofar as
judgment relates subject and predicate by nothing but “is”, a connector

providing no ground for its connection. By contrast, syllogism connects its
extremes through the mediation of a middle term, which, logically speaking,
must again be one of the elements of the concept.
If judgment necessarily takes particular shapes, these will be distinguished
by which elements of the concept they connect, as well as by any generic type
of universal, particular, and individual that distinguishes each type of
connection. No other differentiating factors are available without appealing to
contingently given contents that have no legitimate place in logical
investigation.
Consequently, if any categories are to emerge from the logical treatment of
judgment, they will comprise the generic types of universality, particularity,
and individuality, types whose necessity will reside in how they are ingredient
in the different forms of judgment. To have any necessity of their own, these
forms of judgment must themselves emerge from judgment perse. Otherwise,
their differentiation will be rooted not in the nature of judgment, but in
extraneous, accidental features.
For this reason, the logical investigation of judgment must begin with the
universal determination of judgment, which comprises the minimal
specification presupposed by any further forms that may be logically entailed.
Although any such forms must emerge from this universal determination, once
they do, it becomes differentiated as the initial shape of judgment, distinct from
those that follow from it. Then, the universality, particularity, and individuality
within this initial shape become distinguished as specific types of universals,
particulars, and individuals, externally related to one another by the type of
copula with which judgment logically begins.1
Significantly, these types of universals, particulars, and individuals, can be
embodied in different types of reality and thought. Accordingly, any theory that
privileges one type to the exclusion of the others will truncate thinking and
1 In section 19 of the B edition “Transcendental Deduction of the Categories”,

Kant questions the received view that judgment is a relation between two concepts,
noting that this characterization applies to categorical judgments only, since
hypothetical and disjunctive judgments contain relations ofjudgments to one another.
See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B141-2, p. 251. That all forms of judgment
exhibit an immediate relation of concept determinations, rather than the conceptually
mediated relation of syllogism, becomes evident once it is duly recognized that 1)
judgment logically relates the constitutive determinations of the concept (e.g.
universality and particularity or individuality), and 2) that their relations in judgment
take different forms in function of the generic types of universality, particularity, and
individuality.
The Forms o f Judgment and the Types o f Universals 91
conceptual knowledge. Such privileging will not only limit reason to a form of
universality that is not exhaustive, but limit the application of thought to
particular forms of reality, leaving others erroneously beyond rational
conception. The forms of judgment thus need to be developed in their totality
to liberate reason from the shortsighted truncations that have plagued all too
much philosophy, past and present.
Among historical figures, Hegel stands out for attempting to account
exhaustively and systematically for the forms of judgment. He purports to
develop judgment from no further resource than the concept itself, following
out how the universal, particular, and individual entail the external unification
of universal and individual constitutive of the subject-predicate relation of
judgment. He then proceeds to differentiate the forms of judgment by thinking
through how the minimal form of judgment transforms itself into a further
form, which entails more successive transformations. These metamorphoses
continue until a form is reached that brings closure to the complete series of
particular forms of judgment by engendering syllogism, where the unity of
terms is mediated by another concept component, rather than being joined
through the “is” of the copula. Hegel seeks to escape arbitrariness and
incompleteness by presenting the differentiation of judgment as a self-
development that ends up transcending judgment’s immediate connection of
subject and predicate. All intervention by an external theorist is thereby
purportedly avoided. Whether Hegel has succeeded depends, of course, on
whether the series he presents does comprise successive self-transformations
that lead beyond judgment.
To test Hegel’s achievement and, more importantly, explore the forms of
universality in their exhaustive diversity, one must examine each form in
succession, employing Hegel’s account as a guide, wherever possible.
Preliminary Overview of the Forms of Judgment and the Types of

Universality
Complicating the evaluation of Hegel’s treatment are the two somewhat

incongruous ways in which he divides the territory. On the one hand, he claims
that the itinerary o f the forms of judgment reflects successive applications of
categories of being, essence, and the concept to the connection of universal and
individual. On the other hand, he offers a fourfold division of judgments into
those of quality, reflection, necessity, and the concept. These two listings do
map onto one another insofar as judgments of quality involve categories of
being, judgments of reflection and necessity both apply categories of essence,
and judgments of the concept apply categories from the logic of the concept.
Nevertheless, some explanation is required not only for why being, essence,
and the concept reappear, but for why the intermediate phase breaks into two
successive sets of judgment.
Admittedly, the resulting taxonomy is not far removed from other
traditional divisions of judgment. Under judgments of quality Hegel offers the
positive, negative, and infinite judgments, each pertaining to determinate being
and involving inherence. Under judgments of reflection, the so-called
“quantitative” judgments, Hegel presents the singular, particular, and universal
judgments, each involving subsumption, rather than inherence. Under
judgments of necessity, Hegel develops the categorical, hypothetical, and
disjunctive judgments, each containing relations of genus and species. Finally,
under judgments of the concept, Hegel gives the assertoric, problematic, and
apodeictic judgments, each presenting modal relations in which evaluations
enter. Kant gives very much the same assortment, albeit in a different order, in
his Table of Judgments, placing first, under quantity, the universal, particular,
and singular judgments, second, under quality, the affirmative, negative, and
infinite judgments, third, under relation, the categorical, hypothetical, and
disjunctive judgments, and fourth, under modality, the problematic, assertoric,
and apodeictic judgments.2 Of itself, this convergence may well testify to
mutual confusion as much as mutual enlightenment.
More indicative of the conceptual comprehensiveness of the proposed
division is the typology of universals that it contains. The judgments of quality,
reflection, necessity, and the concept contain, respectively, the abstract
universal, the universal of class membership, the genus, and the universal of
normativity, the “concrete universal”. Each of these types of universal entails a
correlative type of individual and particular.
The abstract universal is “abstract” in that its quality inheres in individuals
whose other determinations are entirely indifferent to the universal they share.
The individual that possesses the abstract universal is immediate in the sense
that nothing else about it is mediated by its universality. For this reason,
knowledge of the abstract universal inhering in an immediate individual
indicates nothing more about the latter. All other knowledge of the individual
must be obtained from other means, such as observation. The abstract universal
is privileged by early modem philosophers, who, not surprisingly, appeal to
experience to know individuals in recognition of reason’s alleged inability to
grasp more than abstractions, and conceive reality in atomistic terms, where
objects are immediate individuals, otherwise indifferent to how they are
connected.
2 See Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. by Paul Guyer and Allan
Wood (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 206 (A70/B95).
By contrast, the universal of class membership relates its members to one

another through ascription of some quality to one, some, or all members of a
class. Here, individuals’ properties are mediated by relation to a group, but
group membership still leaves undetermined what other features distinguish
members from one another. Consequently, although the individual as class
member is not simply immediate, the mediation of class membership leaves
unspecified what subgroups may fall within the class, as well as what
individuates members. The universal of class membership is privileged by
those who restrict general knowledge to “natural kinds”, which, given the
contingency of subgroups and individuation within classes, stand in no a priori
hierarchy and can only be delimited empirically.
The genus, for its part, does determine the particularity of the individual,
mandating specific differentia by which the genus inherently differentiates
itself into species. Hence, knowledge of the genus entails knowledge of its
species, making possible a priori judgments about the differentia of its
members, as well as what sub-groupings of a genus they fall under.
Nevertheless, although the individuals of the genus have a particularity
necessary to the genus, namely, some necessary species being, what
individuates them as members of their species is left just as undetermined as
the individuality of the immediate individual or class member.3 The ancients,
most notably Plato and Aristotle, privilege this type of universality, which is
why they conceive reality in terms of a hierarchy of forms, whose
genus/species relation enables reason to make necessary judgments about the
nature of things, independently of observation. Because, however, the genus
does not individuate its members when it determines their species, the ancients
must leave individuality beyond the grasp of reason, together with those
realities in which individuality is penetrated by universality, realities such as
beauty and freedom.4
By contrast, the universal of normativity, or the concrete universal,
determines the individual in its entirety through the particular and universal.
The individual that is so determined is not the immediate individual, nor
merely a member of a class or a genus and species. Normativity requires an
exemplary existence in which what is individual is no less universal. This
complete union of individuality and universality is basic to self-determination,
where the self, qua self-determined, is what it has determined itself to be,
3 Michael B. Foster discusses these features of the genus, in contrast to the

abstract and concrete universals, in “The Concrete Universal: Cook Wilson and
Bosanquet”, Mind, Vol. XL, No. 157, January, 1931, pp. 1-22.
4 Michael B. Foster exposes this limitation at length in his The Political
Philosophies of Plato and Hegel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968).
giving itself an individual identity that it owes to itself, a self that contains that
individuality in its all pervading unity. Although the concrete universal, and its
associate freedom, may underlie truth, right, and beauty, no other type of
universality is more neglected. That it brings closure to the typology of
universals is suggested by how it exhausts the conceptual gradations in
predication - the universal determines either just the universal (quality or
class), or itself and the particular (genus and species), or itself, the particular
and the individual (concrete universal).
Qualitative Judgment and Abstract Universality
The minimal determination of judgment, the subject-predicate relation,

comprises the starting point for systematically investigating the forms of
judgment and the types of universality, particularity, and individuality. Nothing
more can enter into the necessary differentiation of judgments and a critical
investigation of Hegel’s account must begin by examining how the subject-
predicate relation can be both basic to all forms of judgment and immediately
comprise one such form, qualitative judgment.
Although a proposition may grammatically connect a subject with a
predicate in which contingent contents define each term, the logical
determination of judgment must be restricted to the immediate identification of
the subject per se with the predicate per se. In this connection, the subject must
have a given character in order to be ascribed a predicate. Else, there is nothing
determinate to which anything can be predicated. As such, the subject is simply
a given individual, without further qualification. Although judgment connects
it to a predicate, the subject figures within judgment as something whose
individuality is antecedent to the predication the judgment effects.
Consequently, the subject is an individual with an immediate character that
has, as yet, no relation to the predicate that judgment will assign to it. Whatever
predicate judgment connects to the subject will inhere in the subject as a given
substrate of predication, different from, and thereby possessing determination
additional to whatever content the predicate possesses. The subject can be
conceived to have nothing more specific than this immediate individuality in
which the predicate will inhere. Otherwise, content extraneous to the subject-
predicate relation will be illicitly introduced.
On the other hand, the predicate must, to start with, have a given character
of its own, independent of the subject to which it gets ascribed. If not, the
relation of judgment has nothing determinate to predicate of the subject. Yet to
inhere in the subject, rather than be merely its other or determining ground, the
predicate must be a universal, whose given character remains self-identical in
the individual without being reducible to what the individual contains. Not
only does the universal of the predicate have a determination independent of
the subject, but that universal must be susceptible of inhering in other given
individuals. In this way, the immediate individual is equally an instance of the
immediate universal that inheres in it.
This gives the individual a particularity that is immediate in that being an
instance of the immediate universal neither determines or is determined by the
individual character of any other instance, nor defines the range of predication
the universal enjoys.
Because all these features are inherent in the subject-predicate relation basic
to judgment, all forms of judgment must exhibit them, albeit with different
further qualifications. Nevertheless, these features equally define a particular
type of universal - the abstract universal, as well as the immediate individual
and immediate particular to which it applies.
By its very nature, the abstract universal relates to the immediate individual
in terms of what Hegel, and others, call the positive judgment, the judgment
where the predicate is immediately ascribed to the subject at the same time that
both terms have given determinations that are indifferent to the identity
affirmed by the copula of the judgment. What is immediately individual falls
outside the abstract universal just as the abstract universal falls outside what is
immediately individual. Because the abstract universal inheres in a given
individual that is its instance, the individual has a determinate being that is
other to the universal with which it is identified, just as the universal cannot be
confined to this its instance.
Consequently, the abstract universal is just as much in a negative relation,
that of being an other to the immediate individual, rendering the subject-
predicate connection of the positive judgment a negative judgment in which the
subject is determined to not be the predicate.
Hegel maintains that the negative judgment can be positively expressed as a
predication of particularity to the subject.5By being posited as not the abstract
universal that inheres in it, the subject is determined to be particular. This
becomes evident once one notes that the inherence of the abstract universal in
the immediate individual renders that individual an instance of its predicate. To
be an instance is to be a particular, whereas to be a differentiated instance,
distinguished from others, is to be an individual. O f course, to be a particular,
the subject must also be an individual, and the positive reformulation of the
negative judgment gives the individual in both capacities, for the judgment,
“the individual is the particular”, presents both the individual as individual and
The Science of Logic, p. 637.
the individual posited as particular.

These features are obscured if the judgments involving the abstract
universal are viewed as literally qualitative, involving determinate being. Given
the pervasive reduction of universality to the abstract universal, it is not
uncommon to find quality and universality equated, an equation that appears
fulfilled when positive and negative judgments are identified as judgments of
quality in which categories of determinate being predominate. Quality,
however, must be distinguished from the universal. Quality is simply the unity
of being and non-being that is in the form of being, and determinate being
always involves qualitative relations where something and other are
contrastively determined.6 Universality is the unity of self-determined
determinacy, where otherness is always reintegrated within a subject that
differentiates itself. Something does not inhere in an other, but stands separated
from it by some limit. The universal instead continues into the particular that is
distinguished from it. Nonetheless, the abstract universal has a qualitative
dimension insofar as the individual in which it inheres has a determination that
is irrevocably other to the universal, just as the universal has something about it
that remains ever beyond its instance. In these respects, categories of
determinate being enter in, but only as qualifications of relationships involving
universality, particularity, and individuality.
Judgments of abstract universality manifest their own inability to be
ultimate in the result to which they lead: the determination of the subject as
particular, as an instance of a universal. This predication opens the door to
judgments of class, in which the relations of instances of the same universal get
determined. These relations are posited in the quantitative judgments, where
predication applies to one, some, or all members of a class.
Quantitative Judgment and Class Membership
Qualitative judgment resolves itself into quantitative judgment, and more

specifically, into the singular judgment in virtue of how abstract universality
determines the individual to be an instance. Since an instance is not an
immediate individual, but an individual set in relation to other individuals of
the same universal, its individuality is expressly mediated by its particularity.
That is, the individual is a member of the class of individuals all subsumed
under the same universal.
Because the universal contains this and other instances under its unity, the
subsuming universal is not merely abstract. The universal no longer simply
6
See Chapter 3.
The Forms o f Judgment and the Types ofUniversals 97
inheres in an immediate individual, unrelated to anything else in virtue of that

inherence. Instead the universal subsumes individuals, which are set in relation
in virtue of that subsumption. That relation, however, lays hold of only the
particularity of each individual. Each is determined to be an instance* a
particular, but how they otherwise are individuated from one another is left
unspecified by their subsumption under the same universal. Consequently,
although the subsumption of an individual under the universal entails that other
individuals are similarly subsumed, their identity is not further determined.
Hence, the judgment, “the single individual is a member of the class” entails
that some individuals are members of the class, leaving indefinite which ones
belong. The “singular” judgment thereby transforms itself into the “particular”
judgment.
Although extraneous material might be illicitly introduced to further
identify which group of individuals belong to the class, particular judgment
itself leaves unspecified how the group is defined. Some individuals, without
further qualification, must belong, given that one individual is an instance of
the subsuming universal of class membership. O f course, that some, but not all
individuals belong entails that some individuals do not belong. The particular
judgment thus negates itself. This negation cannot signify simply that certain
individuals fall outside the class, for that merely upholds the original particular
judgment by affirming that certain others fall within the class. Because the
specification of some individuals does not mark it off from any other
determinate group, the negation of the particular judgment precludes excluding
any group from class membership. If just any particular plurality does not
belong, another particular plurality does belong, reinstating the particular
judgment that is to be negated. Accordingly, the negation of the particular
judgment must instead signify that not some individuals belong to the class.
Since this negation is violated if either just one or just some individuals do
belong, it can only be sustained by extending class membership to all. Then,
and then alone, does membership in the class transcend particularity, as well as
singularity.7 When all individuals are subsumed under the universal, the
singular and particular judgments are both negated. Admittedly, the single
individual and some individuals are still contained within the extension of the
class, but they there belong only without excluding any others. In this way, the
particular judgment results in the universal judgment, that all individuals are
subsumed under the universal of class membership.
If reason were limited to the reflected universality of class membership, no
7 These relations exhibit how singularity is a particular type of individuality.

Singularity must thus be consistently terminologically distinguished from individuality
to indicate the type of individuality specific to class membership.
judgment, not the singular nor the particular nor the universal, could provide
grounds for what individuates class members or for what distinguishes one
group of individuals from any other within the class. Because class
membership does not individuate members or their subgroupings, knowing
their desiderata cannot be obtained by thinking the class, but only through
empirical investigation. Similarly, since the particular identity of a class
depends on what individuals and particulars belong to it, and these are left
undetermined by class membership, there can be no a priori differentiation of
classes. What defines each class is itself an empirical matter, to be decided by
the corrigible labors of collection and comparison that uncover the family
resemblances distinguishing natural, that is, empirically given, kinds.
Any attempt to make this the final word on reason is subverted by how
quantitative judgment transforms itself into the judgment of necessity, in which
class gets superceded by genus. As Hegel points out, once all individuals are
subsumed under the universal, the individual cannot fail to be determined by
that universal. In other words, once class membership extends to all
individuals, the individual as such is the universal. The relation to other class
members falls by the wayside, since if the individual must be determined by the
universal, what individuates the individual is no longer indifferent to its
universality, as is the case with class membership. Under the reflected
universality of class, what makes the individual belong is that it is grouped
with others to whom it has no other determinate relation beyond that inclusion.
Through the universal judgment the individual becomes immediately
determined as universal in virtue of its individual identity. This determination,
however, is immediate, which is to say that the necessity of the connection with
the universal is not mediated through any other factor. The universal does not
inhere in the individual, besides other features it leaves untouched, nor does the
individual figure as an instance of the universal, related to others through a
bond that leaves out of account their respective individuation. Instead, the
individual here has its own encompassing nature in the universal, with no
residue distinguished from its universality.
Judgments of Necessity and Genus and Species
Judgments of necessity might appear to have little to do with genus and

species, given how categorical, hypothetical, and disjunctive judgments are
commonly associated with substance, cause and effect, and reciprocity. Hegel
himself endorses this connection, emphasized by Kant, but still affirms that all
of these relationships figure in necessary judgment thanks to the determination
of universal and individual in terms of genus and species.8

What distinguishes genus from class and abstract quality is that genus
comprises the substance of the individuals that belong to it. Whereas class
delimits membership while leaving everything particular and individual
undetermined, genus pervades its individuals by dictating the particular
features that distinguish their species-being. Individual accidents still remain,
insofar as what differentiates members of the lowest species is not defined by
their species being.
Categorical Judgment
The quantitative judgment of “allness” gives rise to the categorical judgment,

that the individual, in virtue of its nature, is the universal. This is because the
common subsumption of all members of a class renders each necessarily and
immediately connected to their predicate. Although the categorical judgment
identifies the individual with a nature to which the universal is immediately
conjoined, their simultaneous distinction as subject and predicate is sustained
to the extent that the individual figures in its species being in relation to the
universal comprising the genus to which the species necessarily belongs.
Fittingly, this species-genus connection is exhibited in every example Hegel
gives (“gold is a metal”, etc.).9
The species being of the subject exhibits substantiality to the extent that it
pervades all features of the individual. Yet, more than a relation of substance
and accident is present, for the individual is immediately tied to a universal of
necessity, a necessity grounded in the individual’s own identity. Or, the
individual as such is connected to this universal. To be a specific individual is
equivalent to being an individual of a kind whose pervading communality
immediately ties it to a distinguishable universal in which it is included. This
relation is that of species and genus, where the individual kind has a nature
necessarily contained within the genus. Although the connection of species and
genus is necessary, it is no less immediate. No other term renders the species a
necessary differentiation of the genus. The genus just consists of the species it
has, without any further ground. The categorical judgment expresses this
immediacy through its copula.
Moreover, although the subject has a species being contained in the genus,
8 In this respect, Hegel points out that substance, causality and reciprocity figure
in the three forms of necessary judgment not simply as categories of essence, but as
incorporated into the form of concept determinations. See Hegel, Wissenschaft der
9 Hegel, Werke 8, Zusatz to 1)177, p. 329; Hegel, Logic, addition to 1)177, p. 329.
its individuality is otherwise still contingent. What distinguishes the subject

from other individuals of its species is left undetermined by species being and
the necessary differentiation of the genus. Consequently, what the categorical
judgment posits is not the necessity of the subject qua individual, but the
necessity of its species-genus connection.101
In positing the subject’s species to be of the genus, the categorical judgment
thus contains an asymmetry. Whereas the species being of the individual entails
the genus, the genus can be in different individuals of its other species, as well
as in other individuals of the same species.11 Consequently, the categorical
affirmation of the necessary connection of species and genus leaves the
individual existence of the species unnecessary.
This asymmetry is expressed in the hypothetical judgment, that if an
individual of a certain species is, then so is an individual of a certain other
species. On the one hand, this judgment posits the necessary connection of
different species, which is the unity of the genus. On the other hand, the
judgment leaves the being of each individual contingent.
Hypothetical Judgment
Ordinarily, the hypothetical judgment is linked to causality and causality is

construed as a cause and effect relation governed by a law neutral to the kind of
entities cause and effect maybe. The hypothetical judgment is thus associated
with efficient causality, which is indifferent to “formal” causality and relations
of genus and species. Yet hypothetical judgment arises from categorical
judgment involving genus and species and in particular from the way in which
the necessary connection between genus and species still leaves undetermined
whether the genus will be realized by one species or another. Accordingly, are
the cause and effect associated in hypothetical judgment individuals, whose
kind is of no consequence, or rather particular species, whose connection rests
on the genus? After all, causal relations are commonly acknowledged to relate
entities of a certain kind, where the cause will be a type of state of affairs
producing as its effect some other type of state of affairs. Although this
presence of kind is usually treated as if cause and effect were linked by a law,
10 Accordingly, Hegel remarks that the necessity of the relation of subject and
predicate is still inner and not yet posited, as it will be in the hypothetical judgment.
See Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik: Die Lehre vom Begriff (1816), p. 90; Hegel,
Science o f Logic , p. 651.
11 Hegel claims that the advance from the categorical to the hypothetical judgment
lies in this indifference of the individual being of the genus to its particular species.
See Hegel, Werke 8, Zusatz to ^[177, p. 329; Hegel, Logic, addition to ^[177, p. 242.
law is properly indifferent to kind, subjecting all legal subjects to the same rule,
whatever they may be. Hence, that cause and effect involve types suggests a
relation of species rooted in the genus they share, or alternately, a relation of
individuals that have a genus and species and are dependent upon one another.
What the hypothetical judgment posits is not the existence of the extremes,
but only the existence of their connection.12The causal relation holds whether
or not there is an individual of that species, whose existence would entail that
of an individual of some other type.
Disjunctive Judgment
The hypothetical judgment entails disjunctive judgment to the degree that the
conditional relation of individuals with a species being gives the universal of
the genus in its particularization, where the individual being of the genus is
identical to the conditional, rather than necessary existence of each of its
species.13 The genus has a disjunctive realization because, as the hypothetical
judgment makes explicit, although the genus exists in the individuals of its
different species, none of them has a necessary existence. That is, the genus
will exist in one or another of these individuals which represent one or another
of its species. What allows the disjunctive judgment to have necessity is that
the universal is the genus and that its disjunctive reality is the exhausted
particularization of its species. Because class does not determine the
particularity of its members, no disjunction of them or of any subgroupings can
ever necessarily exhaust class membership (e.g. the class of bachelors is always
open to addition and further subdivision).14 By contrast, the disjunction of
species is necessarily exhaustive because the unity of the genus differentiates
its particulars, the different species, albeit without individuating the members
of each species.
13 Hegel accordingly claims that what engenders the disjunctive judgment is that
the hypothetical judgment yields the universal in its expressly realized
particularization. See Hegel, Werke 8, Zusatz to 1(177, p. 329; Hegel, Logic, addition
to 1(177, p. 242.
14 Hegel makes an analogous contrast between the instantiation of abstract
universals and the disjunction of the genus: the former allows for an empirical
disjunctive judgment devoid of necessity, where the completeness is purely subjective,
signifying that A is either B or C or D, etc. because B, C and D happen to have been
found. See Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik: Die Lehre vom Begriff (1816), p. 93;
Hegel, Science o f Logic, p. 654.
For this reason, the universal of the genus cannot consist of some mark
abstracted from individuals. If that were the case, the genus would not
immanently determine its disjunction, since what exists in each individual
besides any such mark would be indifferent to it, leaving the differentiation of
both individuals and species external to the universal of the would-be genus.15
Although the disjunctive judgment connects the genus with its
differentiation into species, that connection is present neither in the subject nor
in the predicate. What disjunctive judgment does is posit their immediate
connection. Because the connection is immediate, it remains necessary, rather
than free, in that subject and predicate do not themselves posit their
connection, but have it made externally by the judgment.
Nonetheless, because disjunctive judgment does posit their unity, the
subject thereby gets determined to be the genus united with its necessary
differentiation. This posited unity comprises the immanent combination of
universal and particular generic to the concept. As such, it provides the
distinctive content predicated in the type of judgment warranting description as
the judgment of the concept. Combining the genus with its comprehensive
division into species, this totality comprises a new type of universality to which
judgments of the concept connect a correspondingly new type of individual.
Judgments of the Concept and the Universal of Normativity
Judgments of the concept determine normativity insofar as what is predicated

of the subject is the correspondence of its particularity with its universality.
Truth, right, and beauty all involve the agreement of particular reality with
what is universal in nature. This agreement, however, remains incomplete if
individuality falls outside the correspondence. The relations of species and
genus may equate the exhaustive particularization of the genus with its own
concrete unity, but individuality still remains external to their unification. If
reason were limited to the universality of genus and the corresponding
judgments of necessity, individuality would remain opaque to thought and
individual existence would resist evaluation.
Although the outcome of disjunctive judgment is the posited unity of the
differentiation of species and their genus, that this is now predicated of the
subject signifies that individuality is to be equated with that unity. What lies at
stake is therefore the complete conceptual determination of individuality.
Because, however, the judgment of the concept sets the subject in
The Forms o f Judgment and the Types ofUniversals 103
immediate relation to the posited unity of particularity and universality, the

individuality of the subject does not yet contain the correspondence to be
attributed to it. The agreement of the individual with the correspondence of
particularity and universality is still something external, depending upon the
immediate linkage of subject and predicate through the copula of die judgment.
Assertoric Judgment
Accordingly, the judgment of the concept is, to begin with, merely assertoric,
immediately affirming a connection between individuality and the unity of
particularity and universality that is not already present in the subject. The
connection is posited by the judgment, but since the connection rests only on
that positing, the individual cannot be otherwise certified to fit the evaluation
conferred upon it. As far as it is immediately given, the subject might or might
not correspond to the evaluative predicate. The individual is a candidate for
normativity, of correspondence with the concrete unity of particularity and
universality, something involving more than possessing abstract qualities,
belonging to a class, or having species being. Nevertheless, because the
individual does not contain that concrete unity, it is contingent whether it
warrants the predication affirmed in assertoric judgment.
Problematic Judgment
Consequently, assertoric judgment is problematic, ascribing a normative

predicate that may just as well fit as not fit the individual. Immediate
individuals are not necessarily true, right, or beautiful, but might or might not
agree with such correspondence, depending upon their particularity and its
connection with universality. This signifies that the individual does agree
provided it possesses the proper constitution that is immanent to the universal.
In other words, the problematic judgment issuing from assertoric judgment
ends up positing that the individual is in accord with normativity insofar as its
individuality contains the particular constitution wedded to universality.
Apodeictic Judgment
This yields the apodeictic judgment, that the individual, possessing a particular
constitution entailed by the universal, is concretely universal, that is, a unity of
particularity and universality. Because here the individual already contains
what is predicated of it, what the judgment posits is “necessarily” and
“objectively” the case. Unlike the categorical judgment, which connects the
individual’s species being with its genus, without providing any ground for that
connection, the apodeictic judgment has a necessity that is fully grounded in

the subject. This self-grounding exhibits the autonomy basic to conceptual
determination, which allows truth to be obtained by yielding to the Sache
selbst, following the internal constitution of the factor under consideration.
That factor can be internally constituted and subject to apodeictic judgment
only insofar as it is not externally determined by abstract universals, class
membership, and species being, but self-determined through the immanent
connection between its individuality, particularity, and universality. That
immanent connection is the corresponding constitutive of the normative
universal.1617Accordingly, the individual of judgments of the concept is the
subject that is wholly conceptually determinate, what Hegel identifies as die
Sache selbst}1 This type of individual is what can correspond to the
universality of normativity and figure in judgments of the concept. Its
particular constitution can not just be species being, for that type of
particularity leaves undetermined what individuates members of the species.
The particularity in judgments of the concept is instead inherent to the
individual.
Beyond Judgment
Because of this inherence, both subject and predicate actually contain the
structure of judgment within themselves. The subject unites its individuality
with the particular constitution by which it is connected with the predicate. For
its part, the predicate connects the particular with the universal. By connecting
both sides, the apodeictic judgment posits a relation between judgments, a
relation mediated not by the immediacy of the copula, but by particularity. In
this way, apodeictic judgment transforms the immediate connection of
judgment into the mediated connection of syllogism.
By undergoing this self-transformation, apodeictic judgment brings closure
to the forms of judgment and the corresponding types of individuality,
particularity, and universality. Because the systematic differentiation of
judgment must proceed from nothing other than the concept, once the resultant
series of shapes supercedes the immediate connection of subject and predicate
16 As Hegel points out, universality is here not what the individual ought to be, or
the genus, but the corresponding that comprises the predicate of the apodeictic
judgment. See Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik: Die Lehre vom Begriff (1816), p. 102;
Hegel, Science of Logic, p. 662.
constitutive of judgment, no further forms can arise without appeal to

extraneous assumptions.
This closure does not, however, signify that reason finds its ultimate
expression in the culminating judgment of the concept. Both that judgment and
the syllogisms that follow remain plagued by a discrepancy between what
relates their terms and the terms themselves. In every form of judgment, the
immediate connection of subject and predicate is still different from the united
terms, even if they finally come to have contents fitting their identification.
Similarly, in syllogism, the mediation of judgments remains different from the
judgments it connects so long as their unity must be posited through inference.
Eliminating these last vestiges of externality is equivalent to overcoming the
“subjectivity” of concept, judgment, and syllogism.18
18
For a further analysis of this overcoming, see Chapter 8.
Chapter 7
The System o f Syllogism
Reason and Syllogism
Ever since Aristotle, syllogism has occupied a central place in logic and cast a
fateful shadow upon the power of reason. Recognized to be the great conveyor
of rationality, allowing reason to reach conclusions of unparalleled universality
and necessity, syllogism has equally been acknowledged to be beset by limits.
These limits narrowly circumscribe the reach of reason, if rational knowledge
is based upon the deductive inference by which syllogism mediates judgments
by one another.
Neither Plato, nor his greatest pupil, Aristotle, sees fit to restrict reason to
syllogistic inference. Given how every syllogism operates with premises, they
recognize that if reason were confined to syllogizing, it could never account for
the given assumptions on which its conclusions ultimately rested. Any attempt
to conclude those premises would require further inferences whose own
premises would always stand in need of further deduction. The unconditioned
knowledge required for philosophical wisdom would instead depend upon
transcending the limits of syllogism, something Aristotle and Plato sought by
employing an intuitive understanding of first principles, those privileged givens
that allegedly have an absolute immediacy mediating everything else that can
be and be known. Such intuitive cognition would then empower syllogism to
infer what would follow from the first principles.
The role of syllogism takes on a different cast once the intuitive
understanding of first principles is called into question. Because the form of
immediacy can be ascribed to any content and no putative immediacy can be
justified by anything else without forfeiting its alleged primacy, privileged
givens can never be shielded from skeptical challenge. I f the repudiation of
intuitive understanding leaves reason with no resource but syllogism,
philosophical argument is condemned to an empty formality, where every
inference rests upon premises never fully proven. At best, syllogism becomes a
regulative imperative, leaving reason ever seeking the unconditioned condition
of judgments, which always lies beyond whatever inference gets concluded.
Whether syllogism be supplemented by an intuitive intelligence or left alone
as reason’s solitary device, it can no more account for its own defining nature,
than provide an exhaustive treatment of its particular types. Inference cannot be
inferred without taking itself for granted. Further, because inference employs
premises that, as such, are given rather than generated by itself, it can no more
legitimate its own concept than any other. Moreover, no empirical survey of
inferential thinking can ever reliably locate its essential nature, since what all
observed examples share may be contingent rather than necessary
commonalities. Similarly, whatever types may be experienced can never be
empirically certified to be exhaustive nor even to qualify as types. Empirical
family resemblances can always be revised in face of new observations, just as
no amount of observation can preclude unnoticed varieties.
To be logically accounted for, syllogism must be determined apart from any
contingent content. This does not mean that syllogism per se is completely
formal. It does have a content consisting minimally in the mediated succession
of terms comprising inference. Commonly, these terms are identified as three
successive judgments, which are just as commonly assumed to be determined
in their own right and only externally related through the inference to which
they belong. The connection of inference thereby appears to be something
subjective, rather than objective, residingnot in the judgments themselves, but
in the arrangement imposed upon them from without by some syllogizer. Even
if the conclusion is drawn from the succession of the major and minor
premises, these enter into the inference as givens. Nevertheless, the immediacy
they possess is just as much superceded by the inference of which they are a
part. Insofar as the conclusion follows within the syllogism from them and
them alone, it certifies that their connection is not just subjective, but inherent
in their content. Both aspects of immediacy and posited mediation require
recognition, just as do the externality of subject and predicate in judgment and
the relationship posited by the copula that unites them.
Yet how are the terms that are both initially immediate and posited as
mediated further determined in syllogism perse? To the degree that syllogism
incorporates judgments, these judgments must enter in only as they are
necessarily determined. To eliminate all empirical contingencies, the logical
investigation of judgment must consider the subject as such and the predicate
as such. Instead of predicating some particular universal, judgment per se
predicates the universal as such and does so not of some contingent subject, but
of the individual or particular as such. Similarly, if inference is to be
categorized independently of all contingent content, its constituents must be as
equally conceptually determined as those that comprise the terms of judgment
that get further related inferentially. Moreover, if the minimal nature of
syllogism involves factors that are, logically speaking, the universal, the
particular, and the individual per se, then any differentiation of types of
The System o f Syllogism 109
syllogism will be necessary and exhaustive only if it relies upon nothing but the
generic types of judgment they contain and the types of universality,
particularity, and individuality that distinguish these. Further, if differentiation
of forms of syllogism is to be non-arbitrary, it must emerge from what
minimally characterizes syllogism. Whatever particular types of syllogism arise
must do so from that starting point alone, for otherwise their differentiation will
be alien to the nature of syllogism and contingent upon some extraneous factor.
Although philosophers since Aristotle have freely employed syllogism as a
central fixture of philosophical investigation, a systematic account has been
just as wanting for inference as it has been for judgment. The great exception
to this neglect is Hegel, whose treatment of syllogism follows upon and indeed
follows from his systematic account of the forms of judgment. To escape
arbitrariness, Hegel attempts to think through how the differentiation of
judgment achieves closure when a type emerges whose connection overcomes
the defining immediacy of judgment’s copula, transforming itself into the
mediated connection minimally comprising syllogism. Having thereby
provided an allegedly non-arbitrary account of syllogism per se, Hegel then
proceeds to think through the differentiation of the forms of inference. He does
this by following out how the minimal relationship of syllogism transforms
itself, setting in motion a series of self-transforming types of inference that
exhausts itself by reaching a form that eliminates the type of mediation
constitutive of syllogism.
Not surprisingly, the resulting forms of syllogism arise in an order and
differentiation that largely follows the order and differentiation of the forms of
judgment incorporated within them. One glaring discrepancy stands out,
however. Whereas judgment successively takes the form of judgments of
determinate being (qualitative), of reflection (quantitative), of necessity
(modal), and of the concept (normative), syllogism takes only three forms
correlating with the first three of the four forms of judgment.1 In Hegel’s
account the first form of syllogism is that of determinate being, relating
qualitative judgments and the abstract universals, particulars, and individuals
that these involve. This form of inference transforms itself into the syllogism of
reflection, linking quantitative judgments tying universals of class to
Kant also distinguishes only three forms of syllogism (the categorical,

hypothetical, and disjunctive), despite identifying four forms ofjudgment (of quantity,
quality, relation, and modality). In Kant’s case, the restriction of syllogism to three
forms involves basing them solely on the three species of judgments of relation. He
thereby neglects those syllogisms that involve judgments of quality and quantity, a
neglect that will be demonstrated to be unfounded. See Kant, Critique o f Pure Reason,
A70/B95, p. 206; A304/B361, p. 390; and A323/B379, p. 400.
individuals with the particularity of class membership. Finally, the syllogism of

reflection gives rise to the syllogism of necessity, containing judgments of
necessity and their genus-species relationships. What is lacking is any further
form of syllogism that might correlate with the judgments of the concept,
whose normative relations involve the concrete universal. Instead, the
syllogisms of necessity allegedly exhaust the necessary forms of inference by
eliminating the difference between what is concluded and that by which it is
inferred. This purportedly undermines the mediation constitutive of syllogism,
removing the remaining externality of its connections, in which its abiding
subjectivity resides. With the universal and particular relations of individuals
now completely posited in their own individuality, the category of objectivity
has emerged.
The only way to evaluate the anomaly between the series of judgments and
that of syllogisms is to think through their determinations and establish whether
they transform themselves as Hegel suggests. Doing so will allow us to equally
determine to what degree a systematic account of inference has been achieved
and what significance any closure has for the role of syllogism in the realm of
reason.
In drawing upon Hegel’s investigation to comprehend syllogism, the logical
starting point consists in examining whether syllogism does arise from the self-
engendered closure of the forms of judgment, and if so, with what character it
emerges. This may allow us to lay hold of the minimal determination of
syllogism, which no less becomes a particular form of syllogism once other
types arise from it.
From Judgment to Syllogism
On Hegel’s account, the forms of judgment achieve closure through the

connection posited in the apodeictic judgment. Apodeictic judgment, like the
assertoric and problematic judgments from which it arises, involves the
concrete universal, which unites particularity and universality. As we have
seen,2 this correspondence of particularity and universality is predicated of the
individual in all three of these judgments of the concept. Because the assertoric
judgment makes this connection immediately, providing no ground for the
individual to fit this correspondence, the individual may or may not fit,
depending upon what particularity it has. The problematic judgment posits just
this, which yields the apodeictic judgment insofar as the latter specifies that the
individual has the unity of particularity and universality by containing the
2 See Chapter 6.
appropriate particularity. As a consequence, both subject and predicate now

take on the form of judgments, containing an immediate connection between
individual and particular (the erstwhile subject) and particular and universal
(the erstwhile predicate). Moreover, the identity posited by the apodeictic
judgment resides no longer simply in the immediate connection of the copula
(expressed by “is”). What connects the individual in the subject with the
universal in the predicate is instead the particularity both equally contain,
which is why the connection is not contingent upon some subjective
association, but necessary and objective.
Although the apodeictic judgment nominally has the form of a subject-
predicate relation, the connection it effects yields a relationship leaving
judgment behind, or, more precisely, incorporated in a more concrete
mediation of the three factors of the concept, the individual, the particular, and
the universal. The apodeictic judgment has brought closure to the forms of
judgment by transforming predication into a process in which an immediate
relation between individual and particular is connected with an immediate
relation between particular and universal, leaving individuality and universality
related through particularity. What has emerged is syllogism, taking the
immediate form of an inference concluding universality from individuality by
means of particularity.
These transformations, which Hegel has duly followed, explain both how
syllogism arises from judgment without taking anything else for granted and
how syllogism immediately, that is, without any further development,
comprises the determination of universality from individuality through the
mediation of particularity. This determination is the minimal form of syllogism
to the degree that it rests on no inferences and will be presupposed by any that
follow from it. In this regard, it comprises syllogism perse, while awaiting the
possibility of showing itself to be a particular form of syllogism once others
arise from its workings.
Differentiation of the Forms of Syllogism
Any systematic differentiation of the forms of syllogism must follow from what
arises from apodeictic judgment, given that this delivers the minimal
determination of inference. Appeal to any other resource will introduce factors
wholly extraneous to syllogism, contaminating the development with arbitrary
additions. But does syllogism transform itself into a succession of different
forms yielding one another, before achieving closure by turning into some
category transcending inference?
The first task is to examine what syllogism immediately is. There might
appear to be a discrepancy between what Hegel presents as the minimal form

of syllogism and the elements of apodeictic judgment from which it follows.
Apodeictic judgment can transform subject and predicate into judgments
connecting individual and universal through particularity precisely because the
universality at stake is concrete, containing particularity, just as the
individuality involved is not immediate, but inherently connected to the
universal through its own particularity. Yet, when Hegel examines syllogism as
it results from apodeictic judgment, he finds a syllogism of determinate being,
involving abstract universals, particulars, and individuals, each as immediate
as their counterparts in qualitative judgments of determinate being, which
comprised the initial form of judgment and now build the constituent
propositions of the first form of inference. What makes the universal of
qualitative judgment abstract is that everything individuating the individual in
which that universal inheres is given independently of that universal.
Predicating the abstract universal of the individual has no bearing upon
whatever other qualities it possesses. This individual therefore both is and is
not that universal, just as it can be connected with many different abstract
universals by way of alternate particulars.
One need only examine the outcome of apodeictic judgment to understand
why it yields a syllogism whose constituent universal, particular, and individual
are immediately given, with determinations indifferent to their connection.
Although the subject and predicate of the apodeictic judgment involve an
individual and universal inherently containing the particularity uniting them, no
intermediary connects this individual with its particularity or this particularity
with the universal. Through apodeictic judgment, the individual and the
universal obtain a mediated identity, but one resting upon a subject involving
an immediate connection between individual and particular, and a predicate
involving an immediate connection between particular and universal. What
results is a syllogism uniting the individual with the universal through two
judgments in which, on the one hand, the individual is immediately identified
with the particular and on the other hand, the particular is immediately
identified with the universal. Due to the immediacy of both relations, their
elements have a givenness indifferent to their connection. The universal,
particular, and individual are therein abstract in that the universal and
particular inhere in an individual whose other features are indifferent to them,
just as the universal inheres in a particular left otherwise undetermined by it.
Because the terms all involve a residual otherness not absorbed in their
interconnection, the inference is qualitative, or, in other words, a syllogism of
determinate being. It exhibits the same limitations that afflict the qualitative
judgments comprising its major and minor premises as well as the conclusion
drawn from them.
The M inimal Form of Syllogism: the Syllogism of Determinate Being
The syllogism of determinate being undergoes a development that

unsurprisingly parallels the transformations undergone by qualitative judgment.
Logically speaking, the qualitative syllogism consists in uniting the
immediately given individual with the abstract universal through an
immediately given particular. This can be represented through three successive
judgments: a major premise, “the immediate individual is the immediate
particular”, a minor premise, “the immediate particular is the abstract
universal”, and a conclusion, “the immediate individual is the abstract
universal”. Of key importance is the type of individual, particular, and
universal at play, for this is what differentiates forms of syllogism as well as the
forms of judgment they contain.
Just as the qualitative judgment, “the immediate individual is the abstract
universal”, entails its negation, “the immediate individual is not the abstract
universal”, so the qualitative syllogism immediately subverts what it concludes.
The abstract universal may be predicated of the immediate individual owing to
the immediate connection of abstract universal and immediate particular and of
immediate particular and immediate individual. Nonetheless, the indifference
of the terms to their connection signifies that a different abstract universal can
be predicated of the same individual through the same particular, just as much
as that another individual can have the same universal predicated of it through
the same particular and that other particulars can connect the same individual
and universal. All these options are possible because 1) the individual has
features having nothing to do with its tie to the mediating particular, allowing it
to be connected to other particulars through which it can be united with other
universals, 2) the mediating particular is connected to other universals having
nothing to do with the universal concluded of the individual, allowing other
universals to be predicated of the individual, and 3) the universal is not
exclusively tied to the particular any more than the individual, allowing other
particulars to connect it with the same or different individual. As Hegel
explains, the individual contains a plurality of features, any of which can serve
as the particularity relating it to a universal, just as any particularity contains
more than the determinacy of the abstract universal to which it connects,
allowing it to be a medius terminus to many universals.3 Which individual is
connected to which universal through which particular is therefore completely
accidental to the qualitative syllogism.4
3 Hegel, Werke 8 , 1184, p. 336; Hegel, Logic, 1184, p. 248.

4 Hegel, Wissenschaft d e r Logik: D ie Lehre vom B egrifff 1816), p. 115; Hegel,
The Science o f Logic, p. 674.
In light of this contingency, Hegel designates the qualitative inference a

merely subjective syllogizing,5 whose terms may just as well be substituted by
others. Given the arbitrariness of the content of its immediate individual,
mediating given particular, and abstract universal, the qualitative syllogism
comprises what Hegel describes as the formal syllogizing of the
understanding,6 whose thinking always reflects upon independently given
contents, whose necessity can never be rationally established.7 If reason were
confined to qualitative syllogisms and the qualitative judgments they contain,
philosophy could never prove the universal validity of any content and would
always be dependent upon other sources for what it draws inferences about.
Powerless to account for content, reason might certify the consistency of its
conclusions, but never attest to their truth. The logic of reason would be the
formal logic to which it is reduced by logical positivism.
Why reason cannot be confined to qualitative syllogizing is revealed by the
transformation that inference undergoes through its very own working. Due to
the disseminating connections that subject the immediate individual, given
particular, and abstract universal to indefinitely multiple substitutions, the
conclusion of the qualitative judgment countermands itself. The immediate
individual just as much is as is not connected to the abstract universal by the
given particular serving as predicate of the major premise and as subject of the
minor premise.
Nonetheless, the result is not simply negative. Whatever individual is united
with whatever abstract universal by whatever given particular it shares, the
accomplished conclusion renders that universal connected to that particular
through that individual. Once the conclusion links that universal to the
individual, the given connection between the same individual and the particular
ties the universal to that particular by way of the individual they share. In other
words, the initial form of the qualitative judgment, which can be encapsulated
in the figure: I (individual) - P (particular) - U (universal), results in a
syllogism with the figure: U-I-P, connecting the universal with the particular
through the individual. This remains a qualitative syllogism of determinate
being in that the universal is still abstract, tied to an individual otherwise
5 Hegel, Werke 8, remark to ‘l 182, p. 333; Hegel, Logic, 1182, p. 246.

6 Hegel, Werke 8, remark to 1182, p. 333; Hegel, Logic, 1182, p. 246.
7 Accordingly, Hegel further labels the syllogism of determinate being the
syllogism of mere perception, whose accidental connections contrast with those of the
syllogism of induction, which Hegel labels the syllogism of experience, insofar as it
subjectively combines individuals into a class, which is then concluded with some
universal because that universal is found in every individual. See Hegel, Wissenschaft
derLogik: Die Lehre vom Begriff(1816), p. 134; Hegel, The Science of Logic, p. 690.
undetermined by it, through which it is linked to a particular possessing other

features equally indifferent to that universal. Consequently, the content of the
related terms is just as accidental as in the first form of qualitative syllogism.89
The universal could equally be connected to the same particular through
different individuals who share the latter, to different particulars through the
same individual they share, or to different particulars through different
individuals. Once more, this renders the conclusion subjective, for the abstract
universal just as much is as is not connected to the given particular through the
individual.
Yet, again, the inference that is made generates a new figure of qualitative
syllogism. By concluding the link between the universal and the particular,
while connecting the universal and the individual, the second figure ties the
particular to the individual by way of the universal they have in common. What
results is a third figure of qualitative syllogism, P -U -I, where the particular is
united with the individual through the universal. At first glance, this inference
is no less subjective than its two predecessors. The particular could just as well
be connected through the same universal to other individuals having it in
common, just as it could be tied to the same individual through other universals
inhering in that individual as well as to other individuals through other
universals. With this third figure, however, something has been achieved that
pushes beyond the limits of the qualitative syllogism.
To begin with, all three components, the universal, the particular, and the
individual, have now filled every position in the syllogism. Each has occupied
not only both extremes, but also the position of medius terminus, connecting
the others. This intermediary role is played in the first figure by the particular,
in the second by the individual, and in the third by the universal. Insofar as the
universal, particular, and individual can no longer be distinguished by what
role they play in inference, their form distinctions as much as their contents
have become a matter of indifference. Not only is each term subject to
substitution by other universals, particulars, and individuals, respectively, but
their very form as universal, particular, and individual has been rendered
irrelevant. This irrelevance gains independent expression in the so-called
quantitative or mathematical syllogism, according to which, if one term is
8 Hegel, Wissenschoft der Logik: Die Lehre vom Begriff( 1816), p. 117; Hegel,
The Science of Logic, p. 675,
9 As Hegel points out, insofar as this mathematical syllogism arises from the
transformations of the qualitative syllogism, it is not an improvable axiom, as
mathematics commonly presumes, but a mediated result of other logical relations. See
Hegel, Werke 8, Zusatz to 1188, p. 340; Hegel, Logic, f 188, p. 251.
equal to a second and that second is equal to a third, then the first is equal to
that third (i.e. if A = B and B = C, then A = C). Mathematical syllogism might
be considered a fourth figure, whose schema is U-U-U,101in that its terms
express the same commonality, without anything distinguishing them besides
their numerical identity. Yet, because the concluded quantitative equivalency
abstracts from all qualitative differences, including those specific to the
concept, namely universality, particularity, and individuality, its empty
transitivity eliminates the very factors logically constitutive of syllogism.
Although the qualitative indifference of the mathematical inference reflects
one aspect of the outcome of the three figures of qualitative syllogism, more
has been established. Specifically, the second (U-I-P) and third (P-U-l) figures
have together provided proof of the major and minor premises (“the universal
is the particular” and “the individual is the particular”) of the first figure (I-P-
U), which presents as immediate what these figures posit as mediated in their
respective conclusions (U-P and P-I). This completes the mediation of each
figure by one another. The process was already underway with the move from
the first to the second figure. As Hegel points out, the second figure (U-I-P)
was mediated through the first figure (I-P-U) in that the second figure’s major
premise, U-I, was concluded by the first, while the conclusion of the second
figure, (U-P), mediates the first figure’s minor premise (U -P)11 For its part, the
third figure (I-U-P) presupposes the first (I-P-U) and second (U-I-P) figures,
which conclude, respectively, the relations of individual to universal (I-U) and
universal to particular (U-P) comprising the premises from which the third
figure concludes the relation of individual to particular.12 Through these
reciprocal mediations, each qualitative syllogism possesses givens whose
mediation lies outside it in one of its counterparts.13
As a whole, the sequence of qualitative syllogisms has transformed the
character of mediation in inference. Instead of occurring through a single factor
of the concept, taken in qualitative, that is, immediate difference from the
others, the mediation occurs through a concrete identity in which each term
reflects its relations to the others.14No longer immediately given, the mediating
Hegel, The Science o f Logic, p. 679.
term is now grounded upon mediation.*15Namely, the particular that mediates

the individual and universal is just as much mediated by their relation, and so
forth.16
The type of syllogism that involves such mediation is characterized by
Hegel as the syllogism of reflection. Its component elements exhibit the
relations of class membership that play themselves out in the quantitative
judgments (judgments of reflection), in which predication applies to one, some,
or all members of a class. Although the same figures that order qualitative
syllogisms envelop the syllogism of reflection, its constituent universal,
particular, and individual no longer are abstract and immediate, but reflect the
mediation of class relationships. This mediation is not the self-mediation
proper to self-determination because what mediates and what gets mediated
remain distinct. It is instead the mediation occupying the logic of essence,
where determinacy is determined by a determiner that it thereby reflects. Class
relationships bring this reflection to the universal, particular, and individual.
The individual, as class member, reflects the class to which it belongs,
possessing a particularity shared by every other member of the class. Relations
of one, some, or all members of a class always reflect the implications of the
membership that underlies them. These implications, however, are limited in
that class membership still leaves undetermined what particularities
(subclasses) fall within a class, as well as what individuates members from one
another. By contrast, with genus and species, the universal becomes more
concrete, determining its own particularities (i.e. species), while-leaving
unspecified what individuates members of the same species. All these contrasts
decisively distinguish the types of syllogism that infer conclusions about these
different types of universals, particulars, and individuals.
As we shall see, the development underway progressively resolves the
contradiction inherent in syllogism. This contradiction consists in the
discrepancy between the middle term and the extremes it unites. So long as the
middle term remains distinguished from the extremes, it cannot truthfully be
the unity of them that is concluded through it. The difference between middle
term and extremes is most pronounced in the qualitative syllogism, where each
term is still indifferent to the other. This difference now becomes diminished in
the syllogism of reflection insofar as the terms reflect their mediation by one
another. Because, however, class membership does not determine its

15 Such mediation, Hegel here observes, is the mediation of reflection. Hegel,
Wissenschaft der Logik: Die Lehre vom Begrijf (1816), p. 123; Hegel, The Science of
Logic, p. 681.
16 Hegel, Werke 8, HI89, p. 340; Hegel, Logic, HI89, pp. 251-2.
particularities or what individuates its members, any syllogism involving it will

be plagued by an abiding difference between the unity posited by the syllogism
and what mediates that unity. As Hegel points out, in order for the discrepancy
to be overcome, the middle term must become the same totality that it
mediates.17 That, however, will remove the difference between middle term
and extremes upon which the very form of inference depends. How this
equalization can occur is what lies at stake in bringing the development of
syllogism to closure.
The Syllogism of Reflection
To legitimate the move to the syllogism of reflection, it is necessary to show

why the mediation of universal, particular, and individual emerging from the
forms of qualitative syllogism involves class membership relations of
quantitative judgments, rather than genus-species relations of judgments of
necessity.
Hegel presents the immediate outcome of the qualitative syllogisms to be
the syllogism of allness, where the mediating term between the individual and
the universal is class membership. Class membership is particularity of a
specific kind. Unlike the particularity of qualitative judgment, it is not an
abstract quality, otherwise unrelated to either the individual or the universal it
connects. Instead, class membership relates all members to one another as well
as to the same universal. In so doing, however, class membership is indifferent
to the further individuation of its members, as well as to its own subgroupings.
For this reason, the old saw, “Socrates is a man; all men are mortal; Socrates is
mortal” would be a misleading example of the syllogism of allness if being
human here counted as a specification of a genus. Then, having that genus
would necessarily entail further commonalities comprising the species
necessary to that genus. By contrast, the universal to which class membership
relates the individual leaves undetermined what other universals may also be
shared by all members.
Although qualitative syllogism renders the individual, particular, and
universal mediated by one another as they alternately play the role of medius
terminus, they still remain subject to substitution in each figure. Despite the
fact that each mediates and is mediated in turn, they do not thereby fix which
individual, particular, and universal can operate in the inference in question.
This abiding indifference is what distinguishes the mediation of class
membership. Class is a universal whose own identity is dependent upon the

given being of its members. One cannot derive from any prior specification of
the class either the individual identities of its members or into what
subgroupings they fall. When qualitative syllogism results in the individual
united with the universal through a particular mediated by a universal mediated
by the individual, without any term exclusively defined by those mediations,
syllogism has transformed itself into an inference uniting the individual with
the universal through class membership.
This inference can aptly be called a syllogism of allness because the
mediation it posits concludes the connection of an individual with some
universal from a major premise affirming that all members of a class have that
universal and a minor premise affirming that an individual is a member of that
class. The syllogism of allness fits under the same figure (I-P-U) as the first
qualitative syllogism, but what must not be forgotten is that the particularity is
here that of class membership.
This makes all the difference.18 To begin with, as Hegel points out, the
conclusion of the syllogism of allness is really presupposed by the major
premise.19 Because allness, or class membership, unlike genus, does not dictate
any further determination of the individuals falling within it, any universal tied
to class is so connected by external happenstance.20That is, the relation of class
membership to any universal is contingent upon what features its individual
members may share. In the syllogism of allness, the conclusion (that the
individual is united with a universal) is the only relation actually affirming that
an individual has some other universality. Yet, without this conclusion already
being true, there can be no truth to the major premise, that all members of the
class have the specified universal.21 Hence, the individual stands in immediate,
rather than a concluded relation to this predicate.22 The major premise may
18 Since, as Hegel notes, the middle term specifically defines syllogism and
differentiates it fromjudgment [Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik: Die Lehre vom Begriff
(1816), p. 103; Hegel, The Science o f Logic, p. 663], its content must least of all be
ignored.
19 Hegel, Werke 8 ,1)190, p. 341; Hegel, Logic, |190, p. 252.
20 As Hegel points out, the form of allness (class membership), encompasses the
individual only externally, which means, conversely, that the individual retains an
immediate givenness not reflecting the universality of class. See Hegel, Wissenschaft
der Logik: Die Lehre vom Begriff(1816), p. 131; Hegel, The Science o f Logic, p. 687.
21 Hegel, Werke 8, remark to 1)190, p. 342; Hegel, Logic, remark to f 190, p. 253;
Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik: Die Lehre vom Begriff (1816), p. 132; Hegel, The
encompass all individuals, but because it does so under a universal that fails to
posit their particularities or individuation, it needs their independently given
content for support.
For this reason, the syllogism of allness depends upon induction, the
certification that all individuals grouped in a class happen to have the universal
attributed to class membership. Since class membership does not itself entail
that connection, the certification can only be obtained by observation of every
individual belonging to the class. Expressed as a syllogism, this truth yields the
syllogism of induction, according to which a specific shared feature is
connected to class membership through the complete given array of its
constituent individuals. Accordingly, the syllogism of induction falls under the
second figure, U-I-P, with the crucial qualification that the particularity is that
of class membership and the mediating individual is not singular, but the
complete, immediately given array of individuals belonging to the class.23 This
expansion of the middle term can be expressed by the schema U-I, /', I ” ...-P,
according to which the major premise ascribes a universal to an immediately
given array of individuals, the minor premise affirms the class membership of
these individuals, and the conclusion connects the universal to class
membership.
The universality ascribed to these individuals is not concrete, but still leaves
undetermined which individuals it encompasses, just as class membership
leaves undetermined which individuals exhaust its grouping. Consequently, a
difference persists between the given array of individuals and the complete
extension of class membership. In their immediacy, these individuals may all
possess the universal and may all belong to the class, but that does not preclude
other individuals from belonging to that class without sharing the universal or
from sharing the universal without belonging to that class. To take Hegel’s
example, the major premise may assert that a given array of substances are all
metals, the minor premise may assert that all these substances conduct
electricity, and the conclusion may affirm that all metals conduct electricity,
but the two premises only establish that all metals so far observed conduct
electricity.24 The conclusion therefore depends upon an analogy presuming that
because these class members have the universal, all class members have it as
well. That is, because in respect of class membership, all members are like
these that are given, they will be alike in another respect. By drawing its
conclusion, the inference of induction is relying on this relationship.
Thereby the syllogism of induction has transformed itself into a syllogism of
24 Hegel, Werke 8, Zusatz to 190, p. 342; Hegel, Logic, addition to %190, p. 253.
analogy. Mediation is no longer effected by just the given array of individuals.

Instead, what connects the extremes is the basis of the analogy enabling
individuals of a certain kind to share a certain property. This basis is a
communality that is not indifferent to other features common to the individuals
it encompasses. Although syllogism now once more takes on the abstract
schema I-U-P, the particular is here united with the individual in virtue of a
universality beginning to exhibit the concrete connection of genus and species,
where a kind, unlike a class, entails further groupings.25 This is just a
beginning, however, because the premises of the syllogism of analogy are the
immediate connection between an individual, its class, and some feature (to
take Hegel’s example, “Earth is a heavenly body and is inhabited”) and the
immediate connection of another individual and that class (“the Moon is a
heavenly body”), from which is concluded the connection of the latter
individual and that feature (“the Moon is inhabited”).26 The relation between
the class and the universal remains conditioned by the immediate being of the
individual or individuals in which that connection is given. That immediate
being may possess features not shared by all individuals of the class, which is
why results can be concluded that may not be the case (“the Moon is
inhabited”). If the conclusion is valid, it is because the individual to whom the
universal is inferred by analogy happens to have the right property. This
signifies that the conclusion is conditioned by the constitution of that
individual as well, a constitution that remains immediately given and external
to both the class and its other members.
Nonetheless, the syllogism of analogy just as much undermines that
externality by concluding something it must presuppose.27 The conclusion, that
the individual has the particularity ascribed it through analogy (“the Moon,
being a heavenly body, is inhabited”), is identical in form to the premise (“the
Earth, a heavenly body, is inhabited”) in which the individual has the
particularity in analogy to which the conclusion is drawn. In both cases, the
given constitution of the individual is what links it to that particularity and to
the universal to which they belong. Unless the individual is connected to the
particular and universal through its own constitution, the syllogism cannot infer
what it infers. With the positing of this connection, however, the universal to
which the individuals belong ceases to be a class. No longer is this universality
afflicted with subjective connection, as manifest in how class membership
26 Hegel, Werke 8, Zusatz t o 190, p. 343; Hegel, Logic, addition to 1J190, p. 254.
remains external to both individual identity and particular subgroupings.

Instead, the universal figures as an objective universality,28 necessarily linked
to the constitution of the individuals falling under it. In the syllogisms of
reflection, inference depended upon the immediate givenness of the individual,
setting them generally under the schema P-I-U. With the objective universal
now binding individual and particular together, syllogism becomes
reconfigured under the schema I-U-P.29 Inference has transformed itself into
the syllogism of necessity, uniting the individual with the particular through a
universal that is not indifferent to the particularity giving the individual its
constitution. This universal is the genus and individuals belonging to that
universal are necessarily, objectively bound to the particular inherent in the
genus.
The Syllogism of Necessity
Hegel introduces the syllogism of necessity as a categorical syllogism, so

defined by having the categorical judgment as one or both of its premises.30
The categorical judgment immediately asserts the unity of an individual species
with its genus (e.g. “Gold is a metal”). Although the syllogism of necessity
links the individual and the particular through the mediation of the universal,
each part of this mediated connection consists of an immediate connection, as
provided by judgment. Since the mediating term is the genus, the premises
from which the conclusion is drawn each involve immediate connections to the
genus. The individual is immediately connected to the genus by having a
nature, that is, through its species being. This is what the categorical judgment
asserts. The other premise unites the genus with some particularity. Since this
particularity is not indifferent to the universal, but objectively entailed by it,
this particularity is a species being, necessary to the genus. Accordingly, the
assertion of their connection is categorical. The inferred connection between
individual and particular shares in this necessity and for this reason, Hegel can
duly identify the syllogism of necessity as being, in the first instance, the
categorical syllogism.
Werke 8, 1[187, p. 343; Hegel, The Science o f Logic, p. 695; Hegel, Logic, 1(191,
p. 254.
Although the categorical syllogism falls under the same schema, I-P-U, as
the first qualitative syllogism, the type of individuality, particularity, and
universality at stake precludes the accidentality allowing for multiple
substitutions. Because the middle term is the genus, essentially linked to the
individual through its constitution, that constitution does not lead to other
mediating factors through which other conclusions can be drawn. The
constitution of the individual is its species being and this is inherent in the
genus. Similarly, because the other extreme figures in the inference by having a
specific difference of the genus, rather than some extraneous quality, the
middle term does not entail indefinitely multiple conclusions.31 The same
concrete nature pervades all three termini, whose distinction as individual,
universal, and particular merely presents it in alternate forms.32 The individual
possesses a species being uniting it with the genus, the genus contains specific
differences through which individuals have their nature, and the particular is
specific to the genus and thereby tied to the individuals of that kind. Because
each terminus contains its linkage with its counterparts, there is no need to
prove the premises, generating the infinite regress of syllogisms that plagues
qualitative inference. Far from resting on subjective associations in need of an
account,33 the termini of categorical syllogism involve objective connections,
built into their own content.
Aristotle, who, like Plato, privileges the universality of genus and the
hierarchical knowledge of genus-species it makes possible, not surprisingly
points to substance as the basis for syllogism.34 As Hegel observes, the
categorical syllogism, like categorical judgment, encloses substance relations in
the concept determinations of universal, particular, and individual.35 Insofar as
Hegel, The Science o f Logic, p. 697.
The Science o f Logic , p. 697.
33 As Hegel points out, the subjective aspect of syllogism consists in the
indifference of the extremes with respect to the middle term that mediates their unity
(Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik: Die Lehre vom Begriff (1816), 142; Hegel, The
Science o f Logic, 698). This is most pronounced in qualitative syllogism, but, persists
to lesser extent through the syllogisms of necessity until all remaining difference
between extremes and medius terminus is eliminated. That elimination frees the factors
of the concept from any abiding subjectivity and signals the passage into objectivity.
34 See Metaphysics, Book Zeta, Chapter 9 ,1034a33-35, where Aristotle writes,
“as in syllogisms, the beginning of all is the substance. For syllogisms proceed from
the whatness of things...” (Aristotle’s Metaphysics, trans. by Hippocrates G. Apostle
(Grinnell, Iowa: The Peripatetic Press, 1979), p. 121).
35 Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik: Die Lehre vom Begriff (1816),p. 141; Hegel,
Aristotle and Plato conceive substance to involve a form/matter relationship

rendering each substance an individual of a kind (genus), they can regard the
reality ultimately consisting of substance to be eminently knowable through
syllogisms of necessity. As we have seen, this provides knowledge with an
objectivity surpassing what either qualitative syllogisms containing abstract
universals or syllogisms of reflection involving class membership furnish.
Nevertheless, syllogisms of necessity remain tainted by a limitation that calls
into question their adequacy for philosophical cognition.
The problem is that not everything about the termini of syllogisms of
necessity is determined by their unification through the genus. The individual
may have a nature by which its genus ties it to some specific difference, but
what individuates the individual remains external to the genus-species
relationship. The genus may be inherently differentiated into its species, but the
nature of the genus does not provide the identity distinguishing each individual
from any other of the same kind. This indifference to the individuation of
individuals comprises an abiding subjective element in the categorical
syllogism. Although each member of the genus is objectively connected to a
species particularity, the exclusive identity of each member remains subjective,
being extraneously given. For this reason, when any categorical syllogism is
concluded, the identity of the individual must be supplied by the subject who
formulates the syllogism, irrespective of the content of the genus and its
species.
The same deficit that led categorical judgment to resolve itself into
hypothetical judgment now transforms categorical syllogism into hypothetical
syllogism. The subjective character of the individual in categorical judgment
left the existence of the individual hypothetically conditioned, reflecting the
necessity of the genus-species relation and the accidentality of the individual.
With its characteristic formula (if A then B), hypothetical judgment necessarily
links two individuals, while making the being of one depend upon another,
whose own existence remains contingent. Similarly, the extraneous character of
individuation in categorical syllogism renders the concluded connection
between individual and specific difference contingent upon the being of
another, while retaining the objectivity of the genus-species connection. The
categorical syllogism produces this result insofar as the genus’ indifference to
individuation allows indeterminately many other individuals to be pervaded by
its nature, leaving its subsumption of this individual in the syllogism something
accidental and therefore contingent upon another.36That other, as individual, is

equally indifferent to the genus to which it is connected. Accordingly, this

extreme is afflicted with the same contingency it extends to the subject whose
generic character it mediates.
Schematically, hypothetical syllogism takes the familiar shape: if A, then B;
A is; thus B is. In this way, the necessity of the terms’ relation (if A, then B) is
presented apart from their immediate being (A is, B is). So expressed, the
inference abstracts from both the general determinacies of the concept
(universal, particular, and individual) and the particular form that these factors
have in genus-species relations. Nonetheless, given from where and how
hypothetical syllogism arises, it still retains genus/species relations. The
individuals are not simply abstract; they each instead have a generic nature and
differences specific to it. The necessity of their relation depends upon these
connections of the objective universality pervading them. That is, although the
being of one is dependent upon the contingent being of the other, this
dependency is grounded in what kind of an entity they each are.
Commonly, hypothetical syllogism is taken as an inference of cause and
effect, since cause and effect are both contingent, yet linked by necessity.
Causality, understood as efficient, abstracts from formal causality and thereby
conforms to a law indifferent to the kind of factors subject to it. Such causality
pertains to the material being of factors, in abstraction from what they are.
Accordingly, causal necessity of this sort involves laws of matter. Because such
law is completely indifferent to what it governs, it does not involve
universality, particularity, and individuality. This is why Hegel addresses law
and causality in the logic of essence. There law comprises an essential
regularity whose appearance retains a phenomenal indifference categorically
distinct from the relation of universal, particular, and individual, each of whose
content is just as essential as that of their conceptual counterparts. For this very
reason, cause posits its effect without relating to it as universal, particular, or
individual.
Although hypothetical syllogism does share with causal relationship the
contingency of its extremes and the necessity of their connection, the extremes
are factors of a kind, connected through the objective relations of their genus.
By positing this connection as hypothetical and concluding the contingent
existence of certain individuals, the syllogism presents the individuals of the
genus in two respects. On the one hand, because of their contingent existence,
these individuals do not exhaust the extension of the genus. The syllogism
posits their related existence and not that of other members of the genus. On
the other hand, because their being is contingent, the hypothetical syllogism
could just as well posit the linked existence of any other members of the genus.
Taken together, these features signify that while the genus is either this
individual or any of the others comprising its exhaustive particularization,
insofar as the genus gains existence in the contingent being of certain

individuals it thereby does not exist as the others. The hypothetical syllogism
has thus transformed itself into the disjunctive syllogism, whose abstract
formula is presented by Hegel in two alternate forms: 1) A is either B or C or
D\ A is B\ thus A is not C nor D\ and also 2) A is either B or CorD, A is not C
nor D; thus B is.3783Because what mediates the conclusion is the universal in the
disjunctive array of its contingent particularization, Hegel places the
disjunctive syllogism under the scheme I-U-P,3S whereby it becomes
reformulated as 1) A is B; A is either Bor Cor D, A is not C nor D; and 2) A is
not C nor D\ A is either B or C or D; thus B is. The different ordering is really
of no consequence, for the disjunctive syllogism reaches the same conclusion
whatever sequence is followed.
Given how it emerges, the disjunctive syllogism must no more be reduced
to its formal scheme than any of the other syllogisms of necessity. Following
the familiar sequence of Hegel’s first formulation (A is either B or C or D\ A is
B\ thus A is not C nor D), the first premise (A is B or C or D...) determines the
genus in its exhaustive development and in so doing, contains both the
universal of the genus, the species that are necessary to it, and the contingency
of the individuals in which it consists. The middle term (A is B) is not just a
single individual without further qualification. Rather, the middle term consists
in whatever individuals happen to comprise the genus, individuals that bear the
specific differences inherent in the genus. The conclusion (A is not C nor D)
expresses the exclusive individuality of the given members of the genus,
negating those individuals who happen not to exist. Considered in isolation, the
three terms of the disjunctive syllogism appear to be different in content. The
disjunction of the genus in the major premise appears to contain more than the
array of individuals given in the middle term and those denied in the
conclusion. Yet, through its own inferring, disjunctive syllogism determines
the genus to consist of just those individuals contingently given in the middle
term, who are just those not excluded by the conclusion. Although the
disjunctive syllogism operates on the basis of a distinction between its three
terms, without which no inferring can proceed, the mediation it effects renders
all termini equivalent. Each consists in the same exhaustive determination of
the same genus. Thereby, what mediates can no longer be distinguished from
what is mediated.
37 Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik: Die Lehre vom Begrijf( 1816), p. 147; Hegel,
The Science o f Logic, pp. 701-2.
38 Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik: Die Lehre vom Begriff( 1816), p. 146; Hegel,
Why There is No Syllogism of the Concept
Hegel, as we have noted, does not take this outcome to signal a transformation
of the disjunctive syllogism into a syllogism of the concept paralleling the
transformation of disjunctive judgment into the judgment of the concept. To
understand why Hegel is correct in not introducing any more forms of
syllogism, one need only compare the outcome of disjunctive judgment with
that of disjunctive syllogism.
The key difference resides in the fact that judgment, unlike syllogism,
immediately unites its terms, subject and predicate. Through the copula “is”,
disjunctive judgment immediately connects the universal with its exhaustive
particularization. This renders both subject and predicate identical in content,
but not identical with what mediates them, the immediate connection of the
copula. The subject is now determined to be a unity of the universal and its
complete particularization, but it remains related to this unity immediately, by
the copula of judgment. Hence, what results from the disjunctive judgment is
another judgment in which the subject is affirmed to be immediately at one
with the unity of the universal and its exhaustive specialization. This comprises
the assertoric judgment of the concept, in which the individual is held to be a
unity of the universal and the particular. Because judgments of the concept
predicate of the subject the correspondence of its particularity and universality,
they have a distinctly normative character.
By contrast, the disjunctive syllogism mediates the universal of the genus
with its particularization through an individuality that has the same content as
the genus and its particularization. In order for this outcome to generate another
form of syllogism there must remain some difference between the extremes and
their mediation. This difference is required in order for any inference to
operate. Yet the disjunctive syllogism removes that very distinction.
This development might seem to be nothing new, for the “mathematical”
syllogism already apparently removed such difference by connecting terms
through their numerical equivalence. The mathematical syllogism, however,
only represents one aspect of the outcome of qualitative syllogism, since the
numerical equivalence it certifies entirely abstracts from the factors of the
concept (universal, particular, and individual) logically constitutive of
syllogism. Instead of comprising a bonafide type of syllogism, the
mathematical inference serves to introduce the syllogism of reflection by
exhibiting how the termini of qualitative syllogism are members of a class
whose membership is indifferent to their individuation.
By contrast, disjunctive syllogism retains the elements of universal,
particular, and individual, while rendering the formally distinguishable major
premise, minor premise, and conclusion identical in content. Syllogism,

however, can only persevere by maintaining the formalism and subjectivity
lying in the distinction between the extremes and that which mediates them.
This distinction involves formalism and subjectivity because it leaves some
content unaccounted for by the mediation of the inference.39 Insofar as what
gets unified has determinations indifferent to its unification, the concluding
retains a formal subjective character. With elements undetermined by the
inference, syllogism has a form external to its content. Instead of being
objective to the inference, this extraneous material must be independently
given, as by some subject who stipulates the content about which inference is
to be made.
Through the working of disjunctive syllogism, however, the extremes and
middle term are posited to be the very same unity of universal, particular, and
individual. Because the positing of that identity of content is not present at the
outset, but is effected through the inference, disjunctive syllogism does begin
as a bonafide syllogism. Through disjunctive syllogism’s own mediation,
however, the difference with which it starts is eliminated. Because this
mediation establishes its own identity with its extremes, it ends up leaving
nothing unaccounted for. The relation between universal, particular, and
excluding individual has turned out to be contained within each terminus, for
each has been determined to be the universal in its exhaustive particularization.
From Syllogism to Objectivity
Hegel points out that the transition from subjectivity to objectivity is achieved
when the middle term in syllogism is occupied by all three elements of the
concept.40 In qualitative syllogism, the middle term was occupied by
particularity, individuality, and universality, but only in succession in the three
different forms (I-P-U, U-I-P, P-U-l) into which qualitative syllogism develops
itself. In the syllogism of reflection, the middle term encompassed the
extremes, but in a manner that retained its externality to them.41 The syllogisms
of allness, induction, and analogy all contained the individual and the particular
under a generality that remained burdened by contingency, leaving some
discrepancy between the universal and the factors it embraced. Only with the
39 Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik: Die Lehre vom Begrijf (1816), p. 148; Hegel,
40 Hegel, Werke 8 , Zusatz to ^[181, p. 332; Hegel, Logic, addition to ^[181, p. 245.
culmination of the syllogisms of necessity does the middle term contain

universality, particularity, and individuality in the same way in which its
extremes do. When this occurs, the mediation has become the totality of
syllogism, which constitutively mediates two terms of the concept by the third.
In disjunctive syllogism, the mediation becomes the totality in conjunction with
each extreme becoming identical to that mediation as well. Hence, through
disjunctive syllogism, each term is a totality, uniting universality, particularity,
and individuality and mediated by itself.42 This result warrants the label,
“objectivity”, for both negative and positive reasons.
On the one hand, the totalities that have emerged have nullified anything
formal and subjective about their determination. No longer is anything in their
relation to factors of the concept indifferent to that relation. What is mediated
has become completely identical with the process of mediation. By the same
token, the determination of the erstwhile terms of syllogism has ceased to have
any subjective character, in the sense of possessing an extraneous givenness
that must originate elsewhere.
Positively speaking, this exclusion of formality and subjectivity consists in
the achievement of a totality that is completely self-mediated, despite its
relation to other similarly self-mediated totalities. Objectivity can be seen to
have this character in light of how it stands distinguished from being,
determinacy, and existence. Being is completely indeterminate, given how any
specification would fall into the incoherence of characterizing being in terms of
some determinate being. Any determinate being owes its determinacy to its
contrast with what it is not, whereas existence involves things that are
determined by one another. By contrast, objectivity is not relative to anything
else, but determined in and through itself, exhibiting the independent character
that requires universality, particularity, and individuality for its specification.
These factors of the concept are constitutive of the independence defining
objectivity insofar as self-determination is minimally determined in terms of
universality, particularity, and individuality. The concept logically emerges
when reciprocity eliminates the difference between determiner and determined
that defines the two-tiered categories of the logic of essence. When determiner
and determined become equivalent, determinacy is self-determined.
Universality comprises the unity of what is self-determined in that it pervades
its differentiations, whose particularity enables the universal to be at one with
its differentiation, engendering individuality, determinacy that is determined in
and through itself.43 Although the concept involves individuality, it has not
43 For a detailed examination of how this is so, see Chapters 4 and 5.
posited its own initial identity of determiner and determined. Although the
concept is self-determination, its very emergence from the logic of essence
leaves it with an immediacy giving it a subjective character. This subjectivity
gets progressively diminished through judgment and syllogism, where the
elements of the concept, universality, particularity, and individuality, become
determined by one another. Objectivity is arrived at when what gets determined
by the elements of the concept is no different from the process determining
them.
Consequently, objectivity is eminently conceptualizable, though not through
syllogism. Syllogism may pave the way for categorizing objectivity, but only
by undermining the defining process of inference. This process consists in
setting conceptual factors in a mediation that leaves some extraneously given
content unaccounted for. Because objectivity is a self-mediated totality,
conceiving objectivity requires overcoming the appeal to givenness that always
encumbers inference.
Chapter 8
Objectivity in Logic and Nature
The Perplexity of Subjectivity and Objectivity as Logical Categories
The emergence of the category of objectivity from the closure of syllogism

confronts systematic logic with a puzzle, all the more challenging when one
recalls the basic insights that have driven the whole development up to this
point:
Logic, being the thinking of thinking, stands apart from all other disciplines
by proceeding upon the elimination of any difference between the subject and
object of its investigation. Because logical thought is its own topic, the method
and content of logic cannot be distinguished. For just this reason, logic can
begin neither with a pre-established procedure nor with any pre-established
content without question-begging. Insofar as philosophy only escapes
dogmatism by operating with no unexamined presuppositions about its method
and subject matter, philosophy must begin with the same overcoming of the'
distinction between subject and object that logic presupposes. More than any
philosopher before, Hegel takes seriously these elementary prescriptions, as
most evident in his recognition that access to philosophy requires liberating
discourse from the opposition of consciousness, which confines cognition to
the standpoint where the subject of knowing refers to an independently given
object.
Nonetheless, with the unfolding of the Subjective Logic Hegel reintroduces
subjectivity and objectivity into logic as distinct categories. Here, as we have
seen, he first develops subjectivity as encompassing the concept, judgment, and
syllogism. Then, through the self-dissolution of syllogism, he proceeds to
determine objectivity as encompassing mechanism, chemism, and teleology.
At first glance, any logical treatment of subjectivity and objectivity seems to
explode the distinguishing unity of logical determinacy. By addressing
subjectivity and objectivity discretely, logic appears to operate with a
subjectivity opposed to objectivity, in violation of the identity of knowing and
object of knowing in logic’s thinking of thinking. Naturally, if subjectivity can
be determined before and without objectivity, subjectivity seems to fit the
persona of consciousness, for whom objectivity is always something
independently given.
Further, the specific characterizations of subjectivity and objectivity seem
hardly containable within the confines of logical categories. How can
subjectivity be determined without bringing in extra-logical factors of
psychological reality, with all its physical, biological, and cultural
underpinnings? Can the concept retain its identity without involving
representations of a certain kind? Can judgment or syllogism be characterized
apart from the mental activity of linguistically competent conscious
individuals? The prospects of a purely logical objectivity appear no less
problematic. Can mechanism and chemism obtain specification without
material bodies and the physical processes o,f motion and neutralization? And
how can teleology be determined without subsuming these material factors to
the designs of a conscious agent?
Subjectivity and Objectivity as Logical Categories
The first objection, that logic undermines its own unity of form and content by
determining subjectivity and objectivity as discrete categories, is subject to a
manifold rebuttal. To begin with, the logical distinction between subjectivity
and objectivity is not identical to a distinction between knowing and its object.
This is because subjectivity and cognition are no more equivalent than are
objectivity and object of knowing. Symptomatic of their disanalogy is Hegel’s
own determination of the category of cognition within the logic of the Idea,
which incorporates both subjectivity and objectivity in their unity with one
another. After all, even if cognition involves conceptual determination, it
thereby aims at truth, the correspondence of concept and objectivity. This
suggests that although cognition may involve subjectivity and objectivity,
subjectivity by itself is not knowing proper.
Moreover, that consciousness can be a standpoint for which subjectivity and
objectivity are independently given whereas logic’s self-thinking thought
removes their opposition indicates that subjectivity and objectivity must have a
per se determination. Otherwise subjectivity and objectivity could not be
alternately opposed or united.
In addition, the successive determination of subjectivity and objectivity in
logic need not disrupt the unity of method and subject matter. What matters is
whether the order of categorial development is bound to the content of the
categories themselves. So long as that holds, what gets determined and how it
is specified are tied together. Subjectivity and objectivity satisfy this
requirement so long as they become topics of logic through the content of
whatever category precedes them and then give rise to their successor
Objectivity in Logic and Nature 133
categories through themselves. If Hegel is right to treat subjectivity as the

outcome of the logic of essence and objectivity as the outcome of subjectivity,
their serial emergence only reaffirms the underlying connection of form and
content.
These considerations may deflect immediate dismissal of a logical
differentiation of subjectivity and objectivity, but they do not remove the
suspicion that subjectivity and objectivity are unspecifiable without factors
external to logic. To hold this suspicion at bay, the contents of subjectivity and
objectivity must be addressed.
W hat is Logical and W hat is Subjective in Logical Subjectivity
Properly speaking, subjectivity is not so much an integral category as a

categorial domain extending through the determinations of the concept,
judgment, and syllogism. These three forms successively build upon one
another. Judgment involves the elements of the concept - universality,
particularity, and individuality, relating them externally so as to give them
particular forms, just as syllogism relates forms of judgment to one another so
as to further determine the elements of the concept. All depend upon the
emergence of self-determination, into which the logic of essence collapses once
what determines and what gets determined can no longer be distinguished. This
collapse arises through reciprocity, where the identity latent in every pair of
terms in the logic of essence becomes manifest when the cause of a derivative
term is revealed to be determined as cause by what it determines, leaving its
effect just as much a cause as the cause is an effect. The emergent equivalence
of determiner and determined provides the threshold for self-determined
determinacy. This must further develop since what is self-determined cannot be
what it is until it has determined itself to have its own identity of determiner
and determined. That is, self-determined determinacy must posit itself as it is
immediately given by the outcome of the logic of essence. This incipient
process of self-determination provides the element of subjectivity because it
allows for a self, that is, a subject determined not solely in external contrast
with something other, nor by some ground, nor as the ground of something
derivative, but as an individual, determined in and through itself, giving itself
new character without passing beyond its own dynamic identity. To the extent
that subjectivity is self-informing, it is bound up with the self-development of
self-determination and, thereby, with the elementary terms of self-
determination: universality, particularity, and individuality. Subjectivity is
defined by universality insofar as it remains self-identical in its self-
differentiation, just as it exhibits particularity by acquiring determinacy that is
always a phase in its own development, which no less possesses individuality

in that the identity of the subject is one with its self-differentiation, making it a
law unto itself, unique and exclusive.
Significantly, all these basic ingredients in the self-hood of subjectivity are
purely logical in character, bringing into play nothing but the identity of
determiner and determined, with the universality, particularity, and
individuality that this entails. Physical and psychological factors here make no
contribution. Yet can the same be said when the categorial realm of self-
determination becomes developed as concept, judgment, and syllogism?
Hegel himself admits that the categories designated by “concept”,
“judgment”, and “syllogism” are so named insofar as they fit these terms’
customary usages.1 The “concept”, of course, is commonly understood to be
the basic element of thought, a special universal representation requiring
language for its expression. In the Subjective Logic, however, the concept
proper consists in the determination of universality, entailing particularity and
then individuality. The connection between the concept and universality is
straightforward, for if the concept as such is at stake, rather than any particular
concept, what is at hand is no more than the universal per se. The special
universal representation of discursive thought certainly involves the universal,
that is, the concept, even if it brings along the non-logical baggage of mind,
itself presupposing non-psychological nature as well as the psychological and
intersubjective prerequisites of linguistic intelligence. In this respect, and this
respect alone, the customary usage contains everything that the logical category
entails. Yet, since the universal, or the concept, logically determined, does not
suffice for determining what distinguishes physical or psychological nature
from logic or from one another, the category of concept must be demarcated
from everything else that its name connotes.12
Hegel draws the analogous discrimination between the logical determinacy
of judgment and its customary sense. Judgment, as a logical outcome of the
concept, presents the individual and the universal in immediate connection,
both determining them by and leaving them external to one another. In each of
the further forms into which judgment develops, the elements of the concept
perse, universality, particularity, and individuality remain determined by one
another in this immediate fashion. This remains the case even though the type
of universality, particularity, and individuality at issue becomes progressively
more concretely connected to its counterparts as judgment progresses through
1 Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik: Die Lehre vom Begriff(l816),pp. 11-12,154;

Hegel, Science o f Logic, pp. 582-3, 708-9.
the relationships of formal universal and immediate individual, class

membership, genus, and species, and finally the conceptual normativity where
the individual is determined by a universal already wholly containing its own
particularity. As Hegel expressly points out, judgment’s dual relationship of
conceptual elements is exhibited in the linguistic form of a proposition, to the
degree that the subject and predicate figure as individual and universal and the
copula immediately connects them as external terms. The logical relationship is
absent, however, in everything else about propositions that renders discourse a
worldly phenomenon and qualifies subject and predicate with empirical
content.3
Similarly, the category of syllogism fits the customary representation of
inference insofar as syllogism determines one factor of the concept through
another by means of the third. This leaves room for each pair of the threesome
of universality, particularity, and individuality to be joined through the
remaining term, and for these options to be further differentiated by the types
of universality, particularity, and individuality distinguishing the forms of
judgment. In this respect, syllogism connects each moment of the concept to
another through a series of judgments, which can be linguistically expressed in
the successive propositions of inference. Just as the concept and judgment
involve relationships of universality, particularity, and individuality contained
in conceptual discourse without determining its worldly physical,
psychological, and cultural dimensions, so syllogism mediates judgments by
one another without providing the real content that distinguishes the inferences
of rational agents from their logical form.
Since subjectivity and objectivity both figure as logical categories, it would
be a mistake to locate the subjectivity of concept, judgment, and syllogism in
either the psychological or linguistic elements of conceptual representation,
propositions, and inference. Moreover, insofar as subjectivity and objectivity
are logically distinct, what makes concept, judgment, and syllogism subjective
cannot lie in the difference between these categories as categories and the
worldly baggage of their incorporation in real discourse. The subjectivity of
concept, judgment, and syllogism is just as logical as is the objectivity of
mechanism, chemism, and teleology.
Given the character of logical development, where prior terms are
incorporated by their successors, the ordering of subjectivity and objectivity
leaves subjectivity with two axes of identity. Because objectivity itself contains
concept, judgment, and syllogism as constitutive, but non-reductive
ingredients, their subjectivity involves something shared by subjectivity and
Hegel, Science o f Logic, pp. 624, 626.
objectivity as well as something subjectivity lacks in contrast to objectivity.

The shared element of subjectivity is the already indicated self-development
endemic to self-determination, whose basic structure is defined by the
interconnection of universality, particularity, and individuality. All the
successive shapes of subjectivity exhibit this feature, still absent in the
categories of being and essence. Whereas the categories of being pass into what
is other than themselves and those of essence determine what is a derivative
tier of determinacy, the categories of subjectivity and objectivity involve
processes in which factors transform themselves without forfeiting their
underlying identity. To the degree that self-determination always requires
universality, particularity, and individuality, the permutations of these terms in
concept, judgment, and syllogism testifies to the pervasive presence of the self-
development basic to subjectivity.
That objectivity shares self-development should not be surprising, given
how objectivity is distinguished both from reality (as a category of being) and
existence (as a category of essence). Whereas reality in being owes its character
to its contrast with an other and existence is mediated by some prior ground,
objectivity is determined in its own right, deriving its character from itself. If
objectivity instead depended upon something other as requisite contrast term or
as determining ground, it could never be the proper field of true knowledge, for
it would always rest on something else that could not be known in the same
way. If objectivity were merely real, knowing objectivity would depend upon
knowing what is non-objective, just as if objectivity were merely existence,
knowing objectivity would require apprehending a ground that is never itself
objective. Either way, objectivity would become relative to something lacking
objectivity, undermining its own objective standing. By being instead
determined in and through itself, objectivity can be known on its own terms,
without appeal to something non-objective.
Nonetheless, this self-sufficiency of objective determination does not
distinguish objectivity from subjectivity, for concept, judgment, and syllogism
all comprise structures in which the subject of determination is determined by
its own constitutive factors - universality, particularity, and individuality, albeit
in various ways. What separates objectivity from subjectivity is the overcoming
of a deficiency in self-determination that renders concept, judgment, and
syllogism “merely” subjective. This mere subjectivity resides not in the self-
development shared by what is subjective and objective, but in the abiding
difference between what is mediated and what mediates.
Such a discrepancy might appear completely superseded once the logic of
essence gives way to the logic of the concept, where determiner and
determined coincide. That coincidence of ground and grounded, of cause and
effect does immediately present what is self-grounded, self-cause, or, more
specifically, self-determined. Yet, precisely because the minimal determinacy

of self-determination has arisen from categories of essence, self-determination
has not arisen from itself, as it must do to be what it is. In other words, an
element of external determination still plagues self-determination as it makes
its debut under the heading of the concept. Although self-determination is self-
mediating, what mediates it at the outset are necessarily factors not wholly
identical with it. Self-determination must supersede its own origins to be self-
determined and each further development, from concept to judgment to
syllogism, progressively removes the immediacy and external determination
that accompanies its initial configurations.
The concept may exhibit how universality, particularity, and individuality
develop into one another, but none of these features is itself the relation by
which it is mediated by its counterparts. Judgment does enable each element of
the concept to be determined by the others, but that determination is itself
immediate, exemplified in the copula, whose connection of subject and
predicate is a matter of being, rather than of self-determination. Consequently,
judgment retains a subjective character in the deficient sense of not containing
sufficient grounds for the relationship it posits. Each judgment may contain
subject and predicate in their difference and identity, but no judgment
overcomes the immediacy of the connection so long as subject and predicate
are still joined by a copula. As a result, the determination of one factor of the
concept by another rests on an externality. Subject and predicate do not
connect entirely on their own. Their relationship is therefore not objective, but
still merely subjective.
Syllogism does supersede the immediacy of the copula by mediating the
connection of two terms of the concept by a third middle term. This gets
expressed in the inferential series of judgments where the conclusion follows
from the first premise by means of an intervening judgment. Nevertheless,
because syllogism connects its extremes by a middle term distinct from them,
there is still an externality at hand. Instead of the extremes mediating their own
connection, they get related by something else, which may be a determination
of the concept, but which still differs from them.
As a consequence, so long as self-determination is confined to concept,
judgment, and syllogism, a discrepancy still remains between the terms that are
determined and what determines them. This renders each “subjective” in the
sense that the mediating connection of universality, particularity, and
individuality is not fully contained within them and must be imparted from
without. The abiding externality is, of course, part of the relationships of
concept, judgment, and syllogism, and therefore does not require appeal to an
agent to connect the terms. Nonetheless, it allows for embodiments in which
the relationship of particular universals, particulars, and individuals depends
upon the manipulations of a subject.

This situation is superseded through the workings of syllogism once the
middle term connecting the extremes contains them in their connection at the
same time as they each contain their connection to one another. When that
occurs, the discrepancy between mediated terms and mediation is eliminated,
removing the “mere subjectivity” of that abiding externality. As Hegel shows,
disjunctive syllogism achieves this supersession by relating extremes through a
middle term that ends up rendering each factor equivalent to the whole
relationship.4 The major premise comprises the universal in its complete
particularization, as given in the disjunction of its possible particulars. The
middle term specifies what possible particulars are excluded or included in the
universal, and the conclusion indicates what particulars are respectively
included or excluded in the universal. The disjunctive syllogism is still a
syllogism because the three terms it relates are distinct and interconnected as
separate determinations. Nevertheless, each term contains the same universal in
its complete determination and the mediation of the syllogism ends up
rendering each equivalent. Namely, since the universal of the disjunctive
syllogism is determined to consist of a certain array of particulars and the
middle term and conclusion both determine the universal as that same array,
the difference between the extremes and their mediation is eliminated as a
result of the conclusion. As we have seen,5 this eliminates the constitutive
process of syllogism as well, for syllogistic determination depends upon the
distinction of extremes and middle term.
W hat is Logical and W hat is Objective in Logical Objectivity
What arises from the self-elimination of syllogism can warrant the title,
“objectivity”, in virtue of the features that relate and distinguish it from
subjectivity. On the one hand, the outcome of the disjunctive syllogism consists
of factors that are individuals, whose universality contains their complete
particularity. In this respect, each is determined in and through itself, mediating
its own character as a self-contained totality. On the other hand, they stand in
relation to other individuals that are just as independently determined,
rendering their relation something entirely external to their respective
identities.
By consisting of factors that are independent totalities, structured in terms
5 See Chapter 7.
of universality, particularity, and individuality, objectivity is not a relative

“object” in the sense of a “Gegenstand”, determined in reference to an
underlying structure of consciousness that posits what it confronts. Objectivity
instead comprises an absolute object, a “Sache”, that can be the object of true
knowing insofar as it is determined in its own right, possessing an objective
character rather than a subjective description relative to whatever subject
projects determinacy upon it. Although these distinctions between
“Gegenstand’ and “Sache” anticipate both the logic of cognition and the
phenomenology of consciousness, they rest upon nothing but the outcome of
syllogism. For this reason, objectivity is distinguishable from subjectivity on
purely logical grounds.
Nonetheless, each shape of objectivity seems to transcend the limits of
logical determinacy by involving processes difficult to describe without
importing physical and psychological factors. Mechanism, as defined by
activities of communication, attraction to a center, and self-perpetuating lawful
centered interaction, appears all too wedded to the physical parameters of
locomotion of bodies in their gravitational system. Chemism, as comprising the
neutralization of objects with affinity and the reduction of their neutral product
into objects tensed for further neutralization and reduction, seems already
immersed in the physical transformations of chemically distinguished
materials. As for teleology, the realization of an end seems bound up with the
worldly relation of an agent aiming to realize a represented design in a physical
world of mechanical and chemical processes.
Nevertheless, in each case, Hegel takes pains to forewarn readers that
objective process has a logical determination that can have physical and
psychological embodiments, but can just as well be detached from those
realities of nature and mind.6 Precisely because mechanism involves
independent totalities, defined in terms of universality, particularity, and
individuality, whose external relationships allow judgment and syllogism to
reenter as qualifying categories, these logical terms can do all the work in
specifying the communication, centrality, and lawful systematics of
undifferentiated objects. The same is true of chemism, where the tensed affinity
of chemical objects is defined by the same independent totalities of
mechanism, with the further qualification that they stand in external relation to
one another through a complementary difference. By itself, this relationship
contains no spatial or temporal parameters, nor any specific physical features
that would make chemism equivalent to chemistry in nature. Consequently, the
6 See, for example, Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik: Die Lehre vom Begriff
(1816), pp. 157, 162-63, 166, 169, 171-72, 175, 189; Hegel, Science o f Logic, pp.
711, 716-7, 719, 723-4, 727, 740.
ensuing neutralization and reduction proceeds independently of natural

properties. This independence allows application of chemism to the affinities of
individuals and other spiritual interactions, an application precluded if
chemical process were inherently physical.
By the same token, the independent logical determinacies of mechanism
and chemism forestall any automatic naturalization of teleology, enabling the
realization of the end to involve mechanical and chemical processes per se.
This, does not, however, directly redeem the logical character of the end itself,
nor the end’s relation to its means, and thereby, to its result. The end must still
be shown to be determinable without being a mental representation chosen to
be fulfilled by an agent. Hegel achieves this by strictly defining the end in
terms of the concept relating to an independent objectivity that is essentially
determinable by the concept. What is at stake is not some particular end being
realized in some particular context, but the end per se as it achieves objective
realization per se. Accordingly, the end is the universal, further qualified by
precipitating the process of informing an objectivity susceptible of taking on its
determination. Although the ensuing relationship can be embodied in the
technical activity of a living agent, the relation of end to objectivity through an
objective means is determinate in its own right, irrespective of the further
context in which it proceeds.
These considerations indicate how subjectivity and objectivity can be
logically determined, but in so doing, they pose the question of how logical
subjectivity and objectivity are distinguishable from subjectivity and
objectivity in nature and mind. Since this question concerns the general relation
between logical and “real” determinacy, which applies equally to subjectivity
and objectivity, as well as to nature and spirit, its solution can be drawn from
focusing upon what makes objectivity in nature distinct from objectivity in
logic.
The Distinction Between Objectivity in Logic and Objectivity in Nature
If we take Hegel’s treatments of logic and nature as a guide, it is easy to

distinguish objectivity in logic from objectivity in nature by simply contrasting
the succession of their respective configurations. Whereas objectivity in logic
develops successively through mechanism, chemism, and teleology, objectivity
in nature is restricted to the first two forms, whose natural analogues do not
directly follow one another.7 Instead, nature’s realizations of mechanism and
7 John Burbidge points this out. See John Burbidge, “Chemism and Chemistry”,
The Owl o f Minerva, Vol. 34, No. 1, Fall/Winter 2002-03, p. 13.
chemism, the mechanics of bodies in motion and material chemistry, are

separated by an intervening development of physical processes neither
mechanical nor chemical in character. Moreover, nature culminates in the
internal teleology of living organisms without first embodying the external
teleology that follows chemism and precedes life in logic, but only resurfaces
nonlogically in the technical activity of conscious individuals within the
domain of spirit.
These discrepancies only pose problems if one rigidly presumes that nature
and spirit are determined by successive application of each logical category to
the logical totality of the absolute Idea.8 Then, one would expect an exact
replay of the ordering of categories in the logic, with the difference that now
they supervene upon the absolute Idea as the given substrate they further
qualify. It is debatable, to say the least, that such an exact reiteration is required
by the basic insight that a legitimate conception of nature and spirit must apply
logical categories to the totality of logical determination.9 This insight largely
converges with recognition that a non-metaphysical, non-transcendental
conception of nature and spirit must follow from a self-development of the
system of logical determinacy beyond itself, where the otherness of non-logical
determinacy must consist of a self-externality of logical determinacy. Any other
putative otherness would depend upon insupportable appeals to the “given”,10
reinstating the problematic foundationalism afflicting the opposition of
consciousness. The systematic conception of nature and spirit cannot rely upon
anything other than the logical categories that have emerged
presuppositionlessly, for no other determinacy is available independently of
illicit assumptions. Any ploy to engage in some “logic of discovery”, where
one conceives non-logical reality by uncovering thought determinations as they
are allegedly found in what is given, resurrects the dogmatism of metaphysical
reference, which uncritically assumes that one can immediately think what is.
Alternately, any recourse to transcendental constitution, constructing reality by
treating cognition or, for that matter, logical categories as determiners of the
real, only reinstates foundationalism in an epistemological guise. Here
cognitive structure or logic gets treated as the privileged ground of a derivative
domain whose reality is but a construction of some unjustified external
8 For a development of this position, see Edward Halper, “The Idealism of

Hegel’s System”, The Owl o f Minerva, Vol. 34, No. 1, Fall/Winter 2002-03, pp. 19-
58.
9 Halper argues for such a reiteration. See Halper, “The Idealism of Hegel’s
System”, pp. 19-58.
10 See WilliamMaker, “Idealism and Autonomy”, The Owl o f Minerva, Vol. 34,
No. 1, Fall/Winter 2002-03, pp. 62-71.
standpoint that employs categories to fabricate something else.

To escape recourse to either illegitimate appeals to the given or recourse to
arbitrary construction, there is no choice but to employ the categories that have
emerged presuppositionlessly in systematic logic. This employment, however,
must provide for some determination that does not fall back into logical
development. Moreover, the application of logical categories cannot be
external to the logical development, but must rather follow from it without
introduction of any other content and without sneaking in some agency to do
the job. Logic must develop itself into something other and do so completely
independently. As Hegel indicates, logical determinacy must determine itself as
self-external.11 That is, it must achieve closure by freely generating its own
otherness with nothing but its concluded system of categories. To achieve such
a non-reductive categorial development that can provide the threshold of non-
logical determination, logical categories must apply themselves to the totality
of logic, the absolute Idea. Only then can logic generate something that does
not fall back into one of the categories of logic, achieving a non-logical
irreducibility without surreptitiously importing any arbitrary content or
agency.112
This does mean that the categorization of the real will involve logical
categories further qualifying the totality of logical determinacy. Nonetheless, it
would be a mistake to conceive this supervenience as a serial qualification of
the absolute Idea by each of the categories of logic, taken in the order in which
they appear in logic. First of all, such an application would depend upon an
external application of each category to the same substrate, an application
inherent neither in the category applied nor in the substrate receiving it. This
would violate the methodological strictures of self-development by enlisting an
illicit agency, wholly unaccounted for by logic, to select the proper category
and connect it to the absolute Idea following a rule equally external to what
gets determined. If instead the categorization of nature and spirit is to proceed
in a non-arbitrary manner, the qualification of the absolute Idea by specific
categories must be generated by the determinacy at hand. The development
cannot then involve a simple supervenience of the entire logical sequence upon
11 Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik: Die Lehre vom Begrijf (1816), pp. 305-6;
12 For a further discussion of this transition from categorial totality to reality, see
“Conceiving Reality without Foundations”, in Richard Dien Winfield, Freedom and
Modernity (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991), pp. 33-50, and
“Space, Time and Matter: Conceiving Nature without Foundations”, in Richard Dien
Winfield, Autonomy and Normativity: Investigations o f Truth, Right and Beauty
(Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2001), pp. 54-65.
the substrate of the absolute Idea. Rather, at each stage, further categories will
qualify not the absolute Idea, but the absolute Idea as already determined by
additional categories. Not only will the categories vary from one stage to
another, but so will what they further specify. Since the sequence of logical
categories is determined by their own content, that sequence cannot be
duplicated when the content under development is a very different one
comprised of the absolute Idea as qualified by other logical categories. This is
why the course of the development from logic through nature and spirit can no
more be reduced to the application of a given procedure than can the
development from being through the absolute Idea. Although one may loosely
anticipate that the systematic determination of nature and spirit is self-
developing, and therefore autonomous, this does not signify that any abstract
scheme of freedom applies, or, for that matter, that self-determination could
have a form separable from the content it generates. To the degree that the
categorial determination of nature is the self-constitution of the subject matter,
what the development is a self-determination of is only established at the
conclusion of the development. Moreover, since the resultant identity of what
is underway determining itself presents the key to the order of the whole
development, no pattern of determination can be continuously operative from
beginning to end. Consequently, the absolute Idea does not figure as the
perennial subject of development, to which isolated categories are applied.
Rather, the totality of spirit proves itself to be the ultimate subject of the
ensuing determination to the degree that it encompasses logical and natural
determinacy as well as that of mind.
Objectivity in nature, as well as in spirit, figures within the context of this
development. In the most elementary reaches of nature, where space and time
become supplemented by matter in motion, mechanism gets embodied in the
interaction of independent bodies, whose spatio-temporal dynamic
relationships can exhibit the communication, centrality, and self-sustaining
system of centrality that defines logical objectivity independently of the
physical features of gravitational systems of material objects. Although
empirical observation may supply a wealth of content illustrating the
mechanism of matter in motion, it would be wrong to presume that the
philosophy of nature must appeal to what is given in experience as the ultimate
criterion for the correctness of concepts of nature.13Because such “correctness”
depends upon phenomena devoid of necessity and isolated representations of
equivalent contingency, it can hardly provide a model for truth. To uphold the
autonomy of reason, without which dogmatic presuppositions cannot be
13 Burbidge makes this suggestion in his essay, “Chemism and Chemistry”, pp.
13-14.
overcome, empirical content can only be admitted into the systematic

conception of nature by being detached from its origins and incorporated into
the self-constitution of the concepts of nature and spirit. Within that immanent
development, what may be originally found in observation becomes elevated to
the form of thought, a self-determined form that extends beyond logic into the
theory of nature and mind.
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Index
absolute Idea, 20, 25 n. 10, 141, determinacy, question of, 14-16,

142,143 18, 34,38, 39
analytic-synthetic distinction, 5, determinate being, 42-3,45,129
24, 30 determinate negation, 24-5, 30,
Aristotle, viii, 2, 4, 6, 34,71, 93, 78 n. 11
107, 109, 123, 124 dialectical materialism, 4
Ayer, A.J., 5
empiricism, 51
becoming, 15,16,42-3 Engels, F., 4 ,4 n. 3
being, 12, 13,15,28, 40-41,42, existence, 60, 61, 62, 129,136
43,48,129
Burbidge, J., 140, 143 Fichte, J.G., 7
Foster, M.B., 93, n. 3-4
causality, 57, 99 n. 8, 100-101, foundationalism, 27,49, 61, 130,
125 141
efficient, 57 and the appeal to privileged
chemism, 139,140, 141 determiners, 7, 33, 36-9,
class, see universality, of class 142
membership and the appeal to privileged
cognition, 64, 68,132 givens, 3,6, 33,107,141-2
representational, 73 freedom, see self-determination
concept, viii, 49, 67-8, 69-70, 71,
129-30,134 Gadamer, H.-G., 37
and individuality, 58-9, 71-4 Gegenstand, 139
and objectivity, 59, 62 genus, see universality, of genus
and self-determination, 55, 58, and species
65, 71-4,136-7
in philosophy, 51-3, 65 Halper, E„ 141
in systematic logic, 53-8 Hegel, G.W.F., viii, 11, 15, 16,
logic of, 54 1 7 ,1 8 ,1 9 ,2 1 ,2 5 ,2 7 ,2 8 , 30,
subjectivity of, 74, 105,128, 40,4 2 ,4 3 ,4 5 , 48,49, 53-54,
129-30 55, 56, 57, 60, 62, 63,64, 69,
conceptual scheme, 37, 38-9 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 78, 82, 84,
85, 86, 87, 91, 94, 95, 98,
Derrida, J., 61 104,109,110, 111, 112, 113,
148 Index
114, 116, 117, 119, 120, 121, quantitative

122, 123, 125, 126, 128,131, of the concept, 92, 102-5
133,138,140 positive, 95
Encyclopedia Logic, 70 n. 3, problematic, 92, 103, 110
87 qualitative, 75, 81, 92, 94-6,
Phenomenology o f Spirit, 21, 112
73 n. 6 quantitative, 75, 76, 81, 92,
Philosophy o f Nature, 18 96-8, 117
Philosophy o f Right, 72
Philosophy o f Spirit, 18 Kant, I., 7, 8, 9, 37, 47-8, 53, 62,
Science o f Logic, viii, 11, 16, 68, 68 n. 2, 89, 90 n. 1,92,
19, 20, 25, 40, 49, 55, 69, 98, 109 n. 1
70 n. 3, 85 Kierkegaard, S., 29
Heidegger. M., 37
holism, 23-24 Lenin, V.I., 4
Husserl, E., 7, 37 life, 63
logic, viii, 20-23, 29-30, 54, 67-8,
Idea, 60, 62-64, 74 131
indeterminacy, see also being, descriptive, 1-2
39-41,55 formal, 2-6, 7, 8, 25
individuality, 12, 13, 58, 72, 74, method of, 13-14, 19-30, 64,
76, 77, 78, 80, 82-4, 85, 87, 65
95,102 objective, 56
of being, 19 n. 2, 55-6, 60, 72,
judgment, viii, 67-8, 69-70, 75, 83
134,137 of essence, 19 n. 2, 56, 57, 59,
and types of universality, 90, 60-61, 71, 72, 125
91-4 of the concept, 19 n. 2, 56, 60,
apodeictic, 92, 103-4, 110, 71,72
111,112 prescriptive, 1-2, 26-7
assertoric, 92, 103, 110 subjective, viii, ix, 49, 56, 69,
categorical, 92, 99-100, 100 n. 71,131
11, 122, 124 systematic, 10-14, 40, 49, 54
disjunctive, 92, 101-2 transcendental, 6-10, 11, 25,
emergence from concept, 84-8 38, 39, 62
forms of, 75, 85-6, 89-91 logical positivism, 5-6
hypothetical, 92,100-101,124
negative, 95 . Maker, W., 141
of necessity, 75, 81, 92, 98- mechanism, 139, 140, 143
102
of reflection, see judgment, natural kinds, 93
Index 149
negation, 45-6, 60 133, 136-7

Nietzsche, F., 51 n. 1 and universality, particularity,
nominalism, 52, 75 and individuality, 57, 58, 71-
nonbeing, 43-4, 43 n. 11,45 4, 80-82,133
nothing, 12, 13,15,16, 33,41, of philosophy, 28-30, 55
4 2,43,43 n. 11,48 singularity, 97-8, 97 n. 7
skepticism, 2, 5, 51, 59
objectivity, 8, 59, 60, 61-2, 131- something, 31-3, 39,46-9
44 subject-predicate relation, 84, 85,
and concept, 52, 59, 61-2, 129 86, 88,94-5, 100 n. 10
and reason, viii subjectivity, 60, 61, 71, 74, 105,
emergence of, 128-30 128,129, 131, 132
in logic, 138-40 as logical, 132,133-38
in nature, 140-44 substance, 33-6, 77, 99 n. 8, 123-
otherness, 46,47 24
syllogism, viii, 67-8, 69-70, 90,
particularity, 8, 57-8, 74-5, 76-82, 107-30, 134, 135,137
95 categorical, 122-24
philosophy, 28-30 disjunctive, 126, 127, 128,
of science, 67 129,138
Plato, 6, 52, 53, 53 n. 2, 53 n. 3, emergence from judgment,
75, 93, 107, 123, 124 104-5, 109, 110-11
principle of contradiction, 3, 5 forms of, 109-10, 111-12
hypothetical, 124-26
quality, 31, 32, 35 ,36,39,43, mathematical, 115 n. 9, 115-
44-6,47, 96 16, 127
Quine, W.V., 1, 5 of allness, 119-20,128
of analogy, 120-21,128
reality, 45-46, 60, 61, 62, 136 of determinate being, 112,
Realphilosophie, 18 113-18,127,128
reason, viii, 2, 3, 6, 11, 17, 18, of induction, 120, 128
105, 107-8, 114 of necessity, 122-26, 128
relation, 43, 44 of reflection, 117, 118-22, 128
Russell, B., 83 of the concept, 127-128
qualitative, see syllogism, of
Sache selbst, 62, 104, 139 determinate being
self-determination, viii, 11-13, quantitative, see syllogism,
80-1, 137 mathematical
and normativity, 10-13, 17 synthetic a priori knowledge, 6,
and reason, 28 8, 53, 59
and the concept, 58, 129-30,
150 Index
teleology, 139,140,141 concrete

transcendental deduction, 9 of class membership, 75,75 n.
truth, viii, 1, 3,18, 23, 52, 54, 62- 8.76.77, 92, 93, 96-8, 99,
4, 74, 94, 102, 132,143 117, 118-22
of genus and species, 75,75 n.
universality, viii, 8, 57-58,74-7, 8.76.77, 92, 93, 98-102,
78-81 117,122-26
abstract or formal, 8,12, 52, types of, 75, 92-4
53, 55, 59,75,76, 92, 94-
6 , 112,113 will, 11, 11 n. 7,72
concrete, 12, 92,93,112 Wittgenstein, L., 37
normative, see universality,

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FROM CONCEPT TO OBJECTIVITY

(.;:\ Taylor & Francis

RICHARD DIEN WINFIELD

Published 2016 by Routledge

Copyright © Richard Dien Winfield 2006

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

1. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770^1831.2. Logic, Modem—19th century.

1 Formal, Transcendental, and Systematic Logic 1

2 Method in Systematic Logic 19

3 Determinacy Without Appeal to the Given 31

4 Concept, Individuality, and Self-Determination 51

The Concept in Systematic Logic 53

5 From Concept to Judgment 67

6 The Forms of Judgment and the Types of Universals 89

7 The System of Syllogism 107

Works Cited 145

Reason has come to be regarded as either opposed to objectivity or all too

through the core categorial development of Hegel’s Subjective Logic so as to

A Note on the Text

The above chapters each incorporate previously published material, both

Chapter 3 incorporates in altered form material originally published as,

Formal, Transcendental, and

If philosophy is to legitimate its own quest to conceive truth, it must somehow

The Problem of Prescriptive Logic

Logic, however, can be either descriptive or prescriptive. Descriptive logic

1 See “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, in Willard Van Orman Quine, From A

Formal Logic and the Self-Justification of Reason

justification can rest. If justification instead operates without a given principle

It is this problem that undermines the whole enterprise of advancing formal

4 See A. J. Ayer’s Logic, Truth, and Language (Middlesex, England: Penguin

The Impasse of Transcendental Logic

Transcendental logic is explicitly designed to resolve the difficulties that come

This transcendental logic was pioneered by Kant in a manner whereby

If, however, the structure of knowing, or reference, if one adopts a linguistic

distinguishing objective knowledge from opinion, transcendental logic must

given framework that reason can never justify or criticize.

Systematic Logic and Self-Determination

Although the problems of transcendental logic lead it to the brink of collapse,

residue of givenness, it remains shackled to an assumed content that deprives it

Instead of falling prey to such heteronomy, self-determination exhibits a

determination is the determinacy of individuality.8

For a detailed systematic treatment of this connection see Chapter 4.

content given externally instead of being generated within what is to be judged.

Systematic Logic and the Question of Determinacy

development of self-determined determinacy in which systematic logic

ungrounded and undetermined in any way. It must be whatever it is without

philosophical thought. Systematic logic may make use of propositions in

prescriptive logic is misguided so long as it seeks the self-justification of

Method in Systematic Logic

No problem appears more perplexing in systematic logic than that of method.

Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik: DieLehrevom Sein (1832), pp. 25,38,59-62;

the Logic, where he first addresses the method in a self-consciously systematic

Method As Determined From the Requirements of Logic

Logic consists in the thinking of thinking. Although logic may be called a

follows it, logical development can thus be described as being ordered by

The Reflexivity of Prescriptive Logic

determined by themselves like all other objects of knowledge. If it tried the

11 As we have seen in Chapter 1, this predicament leaves transcendental logic

paradox disappears once it is recognized that the concept of prescriptive logic

The Method of Philosophy as the Method of Logic

determinate content or method involves presuppositions whose legitimacy has

thinking also be first in the path of thinking.12 If philosophy begins with